The Mystical Presence of Christ: The Exceptional and the Ordinary in Late Medieval Religion 9781501765131

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THE MYSTICAL PRESENCE OF CHRIST

A volume in the series Medieval Socie­ties, Religions, and Cultures Edited by M. Cecilia Gaposchkin and Anne E. Lester A list of titles in this series is available at cornellpress​.­cornell​.­edu.

THE MYSTICAL PRESENCE OF CHRIST

T H E E XC E P T I O N A L A N D T H E O R D I N A R Y I N L AT E M E D I E VA L R E L I G I O N

R ichard K ieckhefer

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS Ithaca and London

Copyright © 2022 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. Visit our website at cornellpress​.­cornell​.­edu. First published 2022 by Cornell University Press Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Names: Kieckhefer, Richard, author. Title: The mystical presence of Christ : the exceptional and the ordinary in late medieval religion / Richard Kieckhefer. Description: Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 2022. | Series: Medieval societies, religions, and cultures | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021052222 (print) | LCCN 2021052223 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501765117 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781501765124 (epub) | ISBN 9781501765131 (pdf ) Subjects: LCSH: Jesus Christ—Presence. | Jesus Christ— Divinity. | Jesus Christ—Apparitions and miracles. | Mystical union. Classification: LCC BT590.P75 K54 2022 (print) | LCC BT590.P75 (ebook) | DDC 231.7—dc23/eng/20220126 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021052222 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov /2021052223 Cover art: Katharina Muffel’s vision of Christ as the Man of Sorrows in a mandorla, from the breviary of Katharina Muffel of Eschenau, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek München, Cgm 177, fol. XII verso, ca. 1500.

For Barbara in una anima diu unum esse

And thus I saw him and sought him, and I had him and I wanted him. And this should be our common working in this, as to my sight. —­Julian of Norwich, Showings, Long Text, c. 10

Figure 1.  Christ and the soul, from the Thoofkijn van devotien (Antwerp: Gerhard Leeu, 1487), fol. 22r, Dutch translation of Pierre d’Ailly, Le Jardin amoureux, from the Koninklijke Bibliotheek, The Hague, No. 150 B 48.

C o n te n ts

Acknowl­edgments  xi List of Abbreviations  xiii

Introduction: The Presence of Christ as Exceptional and Ordinary Part One: The Subject and Manner of Manifestation

1 19

1. Divine Person, Divine and ­Human Natures 21 2. Narrating the Presence of the God-­Man

35

3. Presupposition, Intuition, and Perception 88 Part Two: Contexts and Aspects of Manifestation

131

4. Prayer, Meditation, and Presence

133

5. Liturgy and Presence

166

6. Person, Personality, and Gender

203

7. The Inculturation of Christ

225

8. The Presence of Christ in Social Dynamics 255 9. Christ as Disciplinarian, Bridegroom, and Teacher in the Life of Dorothea of Montau 283 10. The Problematics of Presence

322

x Co n t e n ts

Conclusion: Connected Themes in Late Medieval Religion Selected Bibliography  339 Index  357

334

A ck n o w l­e d gm e n ts

While working on this book, I have benefited from many kindnesses from friends and colleagues who have heard or read my ideas and responded with suggestions that have proven im­mensely valuable. When the proj­ect was still in its early stages, friends asked me to pre­sent portions at vari­ous institutions: Gàbor Klaniczay invited me to speak at the Central Eu­ro­pean University; Joshua Byron Smith and Lora Walsh and their colleagues extended their hospitality at the University of Arkansas. Mary Dzon gave me occasion to write at an early stage about one aspect of my research. Stephanie Pentz read a draft and gave me numerous helpful suggestions. John Van Engen and Aaron Moldenhauer gave impor­tant comment on par­tic­ul­ar sections. The Cornell University Press readers, including Racha Kirakosian, gave insightful counsel, pointed me to impor­tant material that I might have missed, and saved me from errors. Librarians, especially ­those in interlibrary loan, ­will never know how well they have served me. And even in casual conversation, friends have mentioned books and ideas that sent me off on a course of inquiry and discovery. My deepest gratitude is to my wife, Barbara Newman, for her meticulous reading and valuable suggestions and for long sharing of interests, curiosities, and commitments. We have not only talked much about Julian of Norwich but traveled together to the place where she meditated, wrote, and gave counsel to Margery Kempe. We have not only compared impressions of Catherine of Siena but gone together to San Domenico and seen Catherine face to face. Not only do we both take an interest in Birgitta of Sweden, but we have visited Vadstena and have seen the saint’s memory preserved in community. We have shared insights into the writings from Helfta and have also visited Helfta together, discovering on site that the spirit, the learning, and the kindness of the nuns are still alive. In seeking the dead we have met the living. My indebtedness thus extends not only to Barbara herself but to all t­ hose we have encountered together in a life of shared fascinations.

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A b b r e vi ati o ns

Style of citations in the footnotes: The default format for citation of abbreviated sources includes book, chapter, and page numbers (e.g., “LSG 2.31, p. 176”), generally followed in parentheses by page numbers for an En­glish translation when one is available (e.g., “Newman, 137–38”). For a work divided into chapters, not books, chapter and page numbers are given (e.g., “LdF c. 28, pp. 52–53”). For works divided into neither books nor chapters, page numbers are labeled as such. When translators’ names are given in parentheses, it is their translations that are used in the text of this book. AF  Il libro della Beata Angela da Foligno, ed. and trans. Ludger Thier and Abele Calufetti, 2nd ed. (Grottaferrata: Editiones Collegii  S. Bonaventurae ad Claras Aquas, 1985), including the Memoriale (126–398) and the Instructiones (404–742). En­glish translation: Angela of Foligno, Selected Writings, trans. Paul Lachance (New York: Paulist, 1993). BMK  The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. Sanford Brown Meech, with Hope Emily Allen (Early En­glish Text Society, Original Series, No.  212) (London: Oxford University Press, 1940). Modern En­glish translation: The Book of Margery Kempe, trans. B. A. Windeatt (Harmonds­worth: Penguin, 1985). Alternative translations: The Book of Margery Kempe: A New Translation, trans. John Skinner (New York: Image/Doubleday, 1998); The Book of Margery Kempe: A New Translation, Contexts, Criticism, ed. and trans. Lynn Staley (New York: Norton, 2001); The Book of Margery Kempe: Abridged Translation, trans. Liz Herbert McAvoy (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell & Brewer, 2003). FLG Mechthild von Magdeburg, Das fliessende Licht der Gottheit, ed. Gisela Vollmann-­Profe (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 2003); this edition, which has a facing-­ page modern German translation, is the one cited. ­There xiii

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is also Mechthild von Magdeburg, Das fließende Licht der Gottheit, nach der Einsiedler Handschrift in kritischem Vergleich mit der gesamten Überlieferung, ed. Hans Neumann, vol. 1 (Munich: Artemis, 1990). En­glish translation: Mechthild of Magdeburg, The Flowing Light of the Godhead, trans. Frank J. Tobin (New York: Paulist, 1998). LdF Johannes Marienwerder, Liber de festis Magisti Johannis Marienwerder: Offenbarungen der Dorothea von Montau, ed. Anneliese Triller, with Ernst Borchert, preliminary work by Hans Westpfahl (Cologne: Böhlau, 1992). LDM Johannes von Marienwerder, The Life of Dorothea von Montau, a Fourteenth-­Century Recluse, trans. Ute Stargardt (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen, 1997). LDP Gertrude of Helfta, Legatus divinae pietatis. French translation: Gertrude d’Helfta, Œuvres spirituelles, vol. 2, Le Héraut (Livres I et II), ed. and trans. Pierre Doyère (Paris: Cerf, 1968); vol. 3, Le Héraut (Livre III), ed. and trans. Pierre Doyère (Paris: Cerf, 1968); vol. 4, Le Héraut (Livre IV), ed. and trans. Jean-­ Marie Clément, the Nuns of Wisques, and Bernard de Vregille (Paris: Cerf, 1978); vol. 5, Le Héraut (Livre V), ed. and trans. Jean-­Marie Clément, the Nuns of Wisques, and Bernard de Vregille (Paris: Cerf, 1986). En­glish translation: Gertrud the ­Great of Helfta, The Herald of God’s Loving-­Kindness Books 1–2, trans. Alexandra Barratt, (Cistercian F ­ athers Series, 35) (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1991); Book 3, trans. Alexandra Barratt, (Cistercian ­Fathers Series, 63) (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1999); Book 4, trans. Alexandra Barratt, (Cistercian ­Fathers Series, 85) (Collegeville, MN: Cistercian Publications and Liturgical Press, 2018); Book 5, trans. Alexandra Barratt, (Collegeville, MN: Cistercian Publications and Liturgical Press, 2020). Partial En­glish translation: Gertrude of Helfta, The Herald of Divine Love, trans. and ed. Margaret Winkworth (New York: Paulist, 1993). LSG Mechthild of Hackeborn, Liber specialis gratiae. Edition: Sanctæ Mechtildis liber specialis gratiæ, ed. Louis P ­ aquelin and the Monks of Solesmes (Poitiers, FR: Oudin, 1877). Partial En­glish translation: Mechthild of Hackeborn and the Nuns of Helfta, The Book of Special Grace, trans. Barbara Newman (New York: Paulist, 2017).



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ME Philipp Strauch, Margaretha Ebner und Heinrich von Nördlingen: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der deutschen Mystik (Freiburg i.B. and Tübingen: Mohr, 1882). En­glish translation in Margaret Ebner, Major Works, trans. and ed. Leonard P. Hindsley (New York: Paulist, 1993). Modern German translation in Die Offenbarungen der Margaretha Ebner und der Adelheid Langmann, trans. Josef Prestel (Weimar: Böhlau, 1939), 5–109. SB Adelhausen Anna von Munzingen, “Die Chronik der Anna von Munzingen, nach der ältesten Abschrift mit Einleitung und Beilagen,” ed. J. König, Freiburger Diözesan Archiv 13 (1880): 129–236 (= Sister-­Book of Adelhausen). SB Engelthal Karl Schröder, ed., Der Nonne von Engelthal Büchlein von der Genaden Uberlast (Tübingen: Litterarischer Verein in Stuttgart, 1871) (= Sister-­Book of Engelthal). SB Katharinental Ruth Meyer, Das “St. Katharinentaler Schwesternbuch”: Untersuchung, Edition, Kommentar (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1995) (= Sister-­Book of Katharinental). SB Kirchberg F. W. E. Roth, “Aufzeichnungen über das mystische Leben der Nonnen von Kirchberg bei Sulz Predigerordens während des XIV. und XV. Jahrhunderts,” Alemannia 21 (1893): 103–23 (= Sister-­Book of Kirchberg). SB Gotteszell F. W. E. Roth, “Aufzeichnungen über das mystische Leben der Nonnen von Kirchberg bei Sulz Predigerordens während des XIV. und XV. Jahrhunderts,” Alemannia 21 (1893): 123–48 (= Sister-­Book of Gotteszell). SB Oetenbach H. Zeller-­Werdmüller and Jakob Bächtold, eds., “Die Stiftung des Klosters Oetenbach und das Leben ser seligen Schwestern daselbst, aus der Nürnberger Handschrift,” Zürcher Taschenbuch n.s. 12 (1889): 213–76 (= Sister-­Book of Oetenbach). SB Töss Elsbet Stagel, Das Leben der Schwestern zu Töß, beschrieben von Elsbet Stagel, samt der Vorrede von Johannes Meier und dem Leben der Prinzessin Elisabet von Ungarn, ed. Ferdinand Vetter (Berlin: Weidmann, 1906) (= Sister-­Book of Töss). More recently issued with a modern German translation is Elsbeth Stagel, Wir hattend och ain gar selige schwester . . . ​/ Wir hatten auch eine gar selige Schwester . . . : Mittelhochdeutscher Text und Übersetzung, ed. and trans. Robert Heinrich Oehninger (Zürich: Werd Verlag, 2003). Oehninger preserves Vetter’s

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pagination. In a companion volume, Wir hatten eine selige schwester: 33 Lebensberichte über Dominikanerinnen aus dem Kloster zu Töss bei Winterthur, nach dem mittelhochdeutschen Text von Elsbeth Stagel (1300–1360) (Zürich: Werd Verlag, 2003), he retells and comments on each account and reproduces the historiated initials. SB Unterlinden  Jeanne Ancelet-­ Hustache, ed., “Les vitae sororum d’Unterlinden: Édition critique du manuscrit 508 de la Bibliothèque de Colmar,” Archives d’Histoire Doctrinale et Littéraire du Moyen Age 5 (1930): 317–517 (= Sister-­Book of Unterlinden). SB Weiler Karl Bihlmeyer, ed., “Mystisches Leben in dem Dominikanerinnenkloster Weiler bei Esslingen im 13.–14. Jahrhundert,” Württembergische Vierteljahrshefte für Landesgeschichte n.s. 25 (1916): 61–93 (= Sister-­Book of Weiler). VCH Racha Kirakosian, Die Vita der Christina von Hane: Untersuchung und Edition (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017). En­glish translation by Racha Kirakosian, The Life of Christina of Hane (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2020). B ­ ecause the edition and the translation are by the same person, the latter is designated “trans.” to avoid ambiguity. VCS Raimondo da Capua, Legenda maior, sive Legenda admirabilis virginis Catherine de Senis: Edizione critica, ed. Silvia Nocentini (Florence: SISMEL, 2013). En­glish translation, Raymond of Capua, The Life of Catherine of Siena, trans. Conleth Kearns (Wilmington, DE: Michael Glazier, 1980). VDM  Vita Dorotheae Montoviensis Magistri Johannis Marienwerder, ed. Hans Westpfahl, with Anneliese Triller (Cologne and Graz: Böhlau, 1964) (= Vita Latina). VLSW  Vita venerabilis Lukardis, monialis ordinis cisterciensis in Superiore Wimaria, Analecta Bollandiana 18 (1899): 305–68 (editor anonymous). VMC Iuncta Bevegnatis, Legenda de vita et miraculis Beatae Margaritae de Cortona, ed. Fortunato Iozzelli (Grottaferrata, Rome: Collegium  S. Bonaventurae ad Claras Aquas, 1997). En­glish translation, Fra Giunta Bevegnati, The Life and Miracles of Saint Margaret of Cortona (1247–1297), trans. Thomas Renna, ed. Shannon Larson (Saint Bonaventure, NY: Franciscan Institute Publications, 2012).



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VVB Isodorus de Isolanis, “Vita beatæ Veronicæ Mediolanensis [de Binasco],” Acta sanctorum (Antwerp: Joannes Meursius, 1643), January, 1:887–929 (references are to this edition); Isidoro de Isolanis, Vita della beata Veronica da Binasco, ed. Giacomo Ravizza (Pavia: Seminario vescovile, 2006).

THE MYSTICAL PRESENCE OF CHRIST

Introduction The Presence of Christ as Exceptional and Ordinary

When Anna Vorhtlin was chosen as prioress of Engelthal convent, we are told, Christ assured her he would be with her in all the cares her office would bring her. He would protect her from adversaries and bestow honor upon her. When the office nonetheless proved burdensome, she prayed, “O Lord, you made me such fine promises, but now I am suffering so grievously!” He replied that he had not abandoned her for one moment but had remained with her always. She then looked up and saw him before her. Taking three steps, he told her she must always walk in his footsteps. Common counsel in late medieval piety: imitation of Christ means following him in a life of affliction.1 Among holy men and especially w ­ omen of the late medieval West, few themes rival in significance the presence of Christ and communication from him. The story of Anna Vorhtlin, which comes from a compilation by Christina Ebner, is one of many. Christ’s frequent presence is a dominant theme—­ arguably the main theme—in the substantially autobiographical book of Margery Kempe, the hagiographic lives that Raymond of Capua and Johannes Marienwerder wrote about Catherine of Siena and Dorothea of Montau, the revelations that Mechthild of Hackeborn and Gertrude of Helfta told to confidantes, the life of Veronica of Binasco written by a l­ater hagiographer on 1. ​SB Engelthal, 36. 1

2 I n t r o d u c t i o n

the basis of notes by contemporaries, and other texts, regardless of differences in genre and context. If the presence of Christ was centrally impor­tant to t­ hese exceptional figures, it was equally central to the devotional lives of more ordinary individuals. The f­ ourteenth and fifteenth centuries witnessed an explosion of devotional texts, art, and practices, and much of this devotional culture was Christocentric and meant to create a lively sense not only of Christ’s historical life but of his presence to the devout person in prayer.2 For ­every individual who saw visions of Christ or heard his voice, ­there ­were many ­others who prayed to him assuming he was r­ eally and literally (if not physically) pre­sent. Meditations on the life of Christ, stations of the cross, veneration of the sacred face of Christ, the rosary, statues of the Virgin and Child or the Pietà, might lead the reader or practitioner to imaginative projection backward in time but could equally produce a sense of the infant Christ or the Man of Sorrows as a living presence h ­ ere and now.3 New feast days celebrated the name of Jesus along with other devotional foci.4 Christ pre­sent in the eucharistic host was increasingly an object of devotional adoration, exhibited in a monstrance and used in rituals of benediction, and carried in pro­cession on the feast of Corpus Christi. A late medieval book of prayers asks for a vision of Christ “with the eyes of the heart” before one’s death, assuming this experience could in princi­ ple be imparted to anyone.5 Devotions w ­ ere supported by indulgences, which could be gained by g­ oing on a pilgrimage, saying a prayer, gazing at an image. If we are seeking historical context for the presence of Christ discussed in this book, it is to be found primarily in this burgeoning devotional culture. If Christ’s presence was so vitally impor­tant both for exceptional and for ordinary religion, the question must be raised: What connections are t­ here between the exceptional and the ordinary? That is the central question pursued in this book. The answer is not s­ imple, ­because the links w ­ ere vari­ous. Most basi2. ​I have discussed this phenomenon in “Major Currents in Late Medieval Devotion,” in Christian Spirituality, ed. Jill Raitt, 75–108 (New York: Crossroad, 1987), and in “­Today’s Shocks, Yesterday’s Conventions,” in “Something Fearful”: Medievalist Scholars on the Religious Turn: A Special Issue of Religion & Lit­er­a­ture 42 (2010): 253–78. My article “Convention and Conversion: Patterns in Late Medieval Piety,” Church History 67 (1998): 32–51, also deals with the interaction of devotionalism and mysticism, of ordinary and exceptional religious experience. 3. ​Iohannes de Caulibus, Meditaciones vite Christi olim S. Bonaventure attributae, ed. M. Stallings-­ Taney (Turnhout: Brepols, 1997); John of Caulibus, Meditations on the Life of Christ, trans. Francis X. Taney et al. (Asheville, NC: Pegagus, 2000); Ludolph of Saxony, The Life of Jesus Christ, trans. Milton T. Walsh (Athens, OH: Cistercian Publications; Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2018-). 4. ​R. W. Pfaff, New Liturgical Feasts in ­Later Medieval ­England (Oxford: Clarendon, 1970). 5. ​ Liber precum, National Library of Rus­sia (St. Petersburg), Ms Lat. O.v.1.206, fol. 16v: “O domine ihesu da michi semper desiderare te fontem luminis vt non prius de hac vita exeam quam te oculis cordis videam. Amen.”

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3

cally, ordinary and exceptional piety enjoyed a symbiotic connection. Widely shared assumptions about Christ’s presence lent plausibility to more striking claims about perceiving that presence, while t­hose exceptional claims reinforced the more wonted assumptions. Visions and locutions reinforced ordinary conviction, but ordinary conviction made visions and locutions pos­si­ble in the first place. A prayer book that cultivated prayer before a crucifix and a story in which Christ spoke back from the crucifix represent two sides of the same Christocentric culture.6 If prayer practices helped cultivate awareness of Christ’s presence, it may have been not so much the more sophisticated meditations but ordinary prayer formulas and even recitation of sacred names that had such effect. The life of a saintly w ­ oman such as Dorothea of Montau may interweave notions of rarefied mystical experience (voiced perhaps by the hagiographer more than the subject) with accounts of hearing Christ insistently in the context of everyday life (prob­ably revealing more fully the subject’s perspective). Scholarly attention tends to be directed ­either ­toward the exceptional figures (the nuns of Helfta, Birgitta, Margery Kempe, and o ­ thers) or ­toward the ordinary religion of parish churches and chapels, homes and cloisters, pro­ cessional routes and pilgrimage shrines. But the exceptional and the ordinary ­were not rigidly detached from each other. Too often missed is the tangled interweaving of commonplace experience and extravagant event, habitual routine and sensational irruption. If we want to understand how late medieval religion worked at any level, exceptional or ordinary, we need to explore how ordinary and exceptional religion related to each other. That, then, is the main point of this book: the embeddedness of the exceptional within the ordinary. Why should Christ’s insistent companionship be called his “mystical” presence? The theme is not usually associated with the canonical mystics of the late medieval West, Marguerite Porete or Meister Eckhart, The Cloud of Unknowing or Julian of Norwich, or o ­ thers, most of whom have only supporting roles or cameo appearances in this book. It might seem better to speak of the “spiritual” presence of Christ. But to call it “spiritual” would emphasize its ordinariness, while calling it “mystical” suggests that it is exceptional. It was in fact both: ordinary as a ­matter of implicit faith but exceptional as a ­matter of explicit experience. The figures we are discussing crossed over the line and claimed to experience in an ongoing way a vivid realization of Christ’s manifest presence, which is referred to ­here as “mystical.” The presence of Christ is, of course, not specifically a late medieval phenomenon. T ­ here is nothing more fundamental to Chris­tian­ity than the conviction of 6. ​Jeffrey F. Hamburger, Nuns as Artists: The Visual Culture of a Medieval Convent (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 94–95.

4 I n t r o d u c t i o n

Christ’s presence. One early Christian poet suggested that he is always pre­sent to receive in his body the pains of his saints, and he had done so already when the Holy Innocents w ­ ere massacred, which implies that even during his historical life he could be spiritually pre­sent in such a way as to receive ­others’ bodily sufferings in his own body.7 In two lines of verse, this poet managed to weave together the historical and transhistorical presence of Christ, his spiritual and his physical presence, his infancy narrative and the suffering in his own body more often associated with his Passion. More typically the aspects of his presence are represented one at a time. At the end of Matthew’s gospel, Christ promised he would always be pre­sent among his disciples. For Matthew he might be pre­sent in the concrete individual in need, the hungry and thirsty calling for aid. For Paul in his epistles his presence might be embodied in the Church, in the Eucharist, in the bodily members of the baptized.8 Even to say that Christ is both divine and ­human is to make a claim about his presence; while creatures come and go, pre­ sent in par­tic­u­lar times and places, it is the nature of God to be pre­sent at all times and places. Christ is the only person seen as reliably pre­sent in both modes, and the Christ who as God is pre­sent everywhere is the same person who was pre­sent at a historical moment.9 A ghost may perhaps stumble across a divide between worlds, but that is unexpected. Christian theology and devotion take it as the special quality of Christ always to be pre­sent everywhere, the same person who was pre­sent in Capernaum or Emmaus. Having tasted ­human experience, having lived a life on earth, he has a story to recall and a personality that inheres in that person. The Jesus of history is not distinct from the transhistorical Christ. To say that “Christ is risen” is again to make a claim about his presence, to say that he is pre­sent to living individuals as alive: stories of his appearance (to Paul in par­tic­u­lar) predate the gospel accounts of the empty tomb, and in at least three of the gospels the absence from the tomb is less prominent to the narrative than the presence to the disciples. That Christ has risen is less significant than

7. ​Sedulius, Carmen paschale, 2.132–33, in The Paschal Song and Hymns, trans. Carl P. E. Springer (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Lit­er­a­ture, 2013), 52–53: “Praesens Christus erat, qui sancta pericula semper/ Suscipit et poenas alieno in corpore sentit.” 8. ​Matthew 28:16–20 (the ­Great Commission), 25:31–46 (the Last Judgment), and cf. 18:20; I Corinthians 11:20–34a, 12:12–28, 6:15–20. 9. ​St. Athanasius, On the Incarnation: The Treatise “De incarnatione Verbi Dei,” trans. and ed. by a religious of C.S.M.V., new ed. (1963; repr. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary, 1989), 45: “His body was for Him not a limitation, but an instrument, so that He was both in it and in all ­things, and outside all ­things, resting in the ­Father alone. At one and the same time—­this is the won­der—as Man He was living a ­human life, and as Word He was sustaining the life of the universe, and as Son He was in constant ­union with the F ­ ather.”

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that he is risen. The martyrs had visions of Christ when they ­were about to die.10 He stood by Saint Anthony in his temptation, but appeared only afterward. He came to Saint Martin and ­others incognito, as a beggar. He spoke to Saint Francis of Assisi and ­others from a crucifix.11 Twelfth-­century Cistercians insisted that the historical “memory” of Jesus might be delightful but the experience of his living presence was far more so.12 When a friar visited an el­derly w ­ oman, she knew that he had medical prob­lems, but she said Jesus had spoken to her that morning and given assurance that his medical treatment would go well. Often ­these stories are difficult to locate in time and place, but this incident can be assigned with precision to the northwest side of Chicago, in 2009.13 Volumes have been written about ­people who report such experiences in recent times.14 Still, ­there are aspects of the theme that are especially characteristic of late medieval piety, if not unique to it. Between the late thirteenth and the early fifteenth centuries, hearing the voice of Christ and sometimes beholding him in visions w ­ ere phenomena interwoven with the everyday lives of individuals and sometimes with the communal routines of ­women’s monasteries, particularly their liturgical routines. Saints’ vitae and other sources in the ­later medieval West sometimes represented contact with Christ as not just an occasional 10. ​Larry W. Hurtado, Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Chris­tian­ity (­Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003), 619–25. 11. ​Athanasius, “Life of Antony,” c. 10, in Early Christian Lives, trans. and ed. Carolinne White (London: Penguin, 1998), 16; Sulpicius Severus, “Life of Martin of Tours,” 3.1–4, in White, Early Christian Lives, 137–38; Thomas of Celano, “Second Life of St. Francis,” 1.6.10, in Placid Hermann, ed. and trans., St. Francis of Assisi: First and Second Life of St. Francis, with Se­lections from Treatise on the Miracles of Blessed Francis (Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1963), 144; Dyan Elliott, “True Presence / False Christ: The Antinomies of Embodiment in Medieval Spirituality,” Mediaeval Studies 64 (2002): 253. A still useful starting point for locating stories about Christ in hagiography is E. Cobham Brewer, A Dictionary of Miracles, Imitative, Realistic, and Dogmatic (Philadelphia, 1894), 543–44. 12. ​Heinrich Lausberg, Der Hymnus “Jesu dulcis memoria” (Munich: Hueber, 1967); Helen Deeming, “­Music and Contemplation in the Twelfth-­Century Dulcis Jesu memoria,” Journal of the Royal Musical Association 139 (2014): 1–39. 13. ​Personal communication from Paul Lachance, O.F.M., August 22, 2009. 14. ​G. Scott Sparrow, I Am with You Always: True Stories of Encounters with Jesus (New York: Bantam, 1995); Phillip H. Wiebe, Visions of Jesus: Direct Encounters from the New Testament to ­Today (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Phillip H. Wiebe, “Critical Reflections on Christic Visions,” in Cognitive Models and Spiritual Maps: Interdisciplinary Explorations of Religious Experience, ed. Jensine Andresen and Robert K. C. Forman, Journal of Consciousness Studies 7, nos. 11–12 (2000): 119–41. See also Simone Weil, “Spiritual Autobiography,” in Waiting on God, trans. Emma Craufurd (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1951), 24: “Sometimes . . . ​during this recitation [of the Our ­Father] or at other moments, Christ is pre­sent with me in person; but his presence is infinitely more real, more moving, more clear than on that first occasion when he took possession of me.” For very dif­fer­ent articulations of the theme, see ­Father Germanus of St. Stanislaus, The Life of the Servant of God Gemma Galgani, an Italian Maiden of Lucca, trans. A. M. O’­Sullivan (London and Edinburgh: Sands, 1913), 218–20, and Anthony Bloom, School for Prayer (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1970), xi–­xii.

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but a frequent experience. He might be a saint’s “frequent visitor,” ever in her com­pany, as was said of Catherine of Siena.15 It is this pervasive presence—­ the interaction and communication with Christ that become so frequent that he seems almost a constant companion—­that is ­here called the “mystical presence” of Christ. During the long ­fourteenth ­century, cases of such interweaving can be found especially in Germany but also in Italy, ­England, and elsewhere, in tandem with the Christocentric devotionalism prevalent at the time. Devotionalism brought religion into ­every corner of life, and the mystical presence of Christ was the experience of his presence in that same quotidian environment. While t­ hese tendencies lasted, they played a tremendously impor­tant role in religious culture.16 Already in the first half of the thirteenth c­ entury ­there w ­ ere individuals such as the Flemish nun Lutgard of Aywières (1182–1246), who had a vision of Christ that dissuaded her from marriage, had another vision of Christ crucified, and experienced further encounters with Christ. Sometimes he gave her reassurance regarding the state of her soul, or her inattention to liturgy, or her death. She beheld the face of Christ and was united with him in contemplation. Her vita says, “The presence of Christ renders ­every place, no ­matter how hateful, supremely delightful and remarkably desirable.” When she died, the nuns of her convent knew that Jesus came with the saints to receive her. Often her contact with Christ came when she interceded on behalf of ­others.17 Her vita does not talk about integration of Christ’s presence with liturgical and quotidian experience, but it anticipates ­later cases in which that presence was even more fully experienced. Ida of Nivelles (ca. 1190–1231) also often conversed with Christ; he “beckoned to her,” his spirit was “ever-­familiar,” and during mass she sensed his presence on the altar, but if he came to her as a 15. ​VCS 1.9.86, Kearns, 78; VCS 1.11.112, Kearns, 103. 16. ​See Pierre Rousselot and Joseph Huby, “Chris­tian­ity in the ­Middle Ages,” in The Life of the Church, ed. Pierre Rousselot, Léonce de Grandmaison, Joseph Huby, Alexandre Brou, and Martin Cyril D’Arcy (London: Sheed & Ward, 1932), 181: “The g­ reat novelty, the incomparable merit, of the ­middle ages was mankind’s understanding of, and love for, or rather, what might better be called passion for, Christ. The Word made flesh, homo Christus Jesus, is no longer merely the model to be imitated, the guide to be followed and also the uncreated light that illumines the interior of the soul; but He is also immanent in the soul even in His h ­ uman nature; He is the spouse of the soul, acting with her and in her, He is the friend.” The idea expressed ­here is apt, but it applies unevenly to medieval spiritual writing. The texts examined in this book represent the fullest development of the theme. 17. ​Thomas of Cantimpré, The Collected Saints’ Lives: Abbot John of Cantimpré, Christina the Astonishing, Margaret of Ypres, and Lutgard of Aywières, ed. Barbara Newman, trans. Margot H. King and Barbara Newman (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008), 1.2, p. 218; 1.12, pp. 226–27; 1.19, p. 234; 1.22, p. 238; 2.5, p. 243; 2.17, p. 252; 2.21, p. 256; 2.33, p. 262; 3.9–12, pp. 281–84; 3.17, p. 289. Contact in the context of intercession in 2.3, p. 241; 2.4, p. 242; 2.6, pp. 243–44; 2.9–10, p. 246–47; 2.19–20, pp. 254–55; 3.5, p. 278.

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child, they would engage in playful exchange.18 In both ­these cases, as in ­others, t­ here is anticipation of tendencies that would become more fully and richly developed in the long ­fourteenth ­century.

Plan of This Book If ­people claimed to experience the presence of Christ, it may be useful to begin by asking about the Christ they encountered. Much of the historical lit­er­a­ ture over the past two generations has assumed that late medieval devotion was chiefly to the humanity of Christ. Chapters 1 and 2 ­will show that this notion is problematic. The Christ whose presence is reported in the sources is very much a divine Christ. In the religious lit­er­a­ture and in common parlance, Christ is almost ubiquitously referred to as God. He may be helpless in the manger and suffering on the cross, but in medieval sources it is usually clear—­and often emphasized—­that it is God in the manger and God on the cross.19 Christ on the cross says he wishes “to show you that I, God, stop my ears in heaven.”20 Is ­there confusion ­here, or misunderstanding? No, what we find in the sources is standard, long-­standing theology of Christ’s person and natures. For our late medieval sources, Christ’s divinity is not only a ­matter of faith but, as we ­shall see, a fundamentally impor­tant precondition for both ordinary and exceptional experience of his presence. Chapter 1 lays out the basic argument and its theological implications, while chapter 2 traces how ­these issues are dealt with in a range of ­later medieval texts. That traditional Christology can be seen in late medieval texts should not be surprising or controversial; that the divinity of Christ was impor­tant to late medieval writers is no g­ reat discovery. Nonetheless, the strong emphasis in the scholarly lit­er­a­ture on the humanity of Christ tends to obscure why and how his divinity was crucially impor­tant. While chapters 1 and 2 jointly deal with t­ hese issues, chapter 2 also serves to introduce to the reader the texts and personalities that ­will recur throughout the book. Chapter 3 then turns from the Christ who is revealed to the recipients of that revelation. T ­ hose who are said to have heard and seen Christ are easily 18. ​Martinus Cowley, trans., Send Me God: The Lives of Ida the Compassionate of Nivelles, Nun lf La Ramée, Arnulf, Lay B ­ rother of Villers, and Abundus, Monk of Villers, by Goswin of Bossut (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003), c. 26a, p. 72; c. 26b, p. 73; c. 4a, p. 37; c. 9b, p. 44; c. 23b, pp. 67–68; c. 29b-4, p. 80. 19. ​E.g., SB Adelhausen, 162 (“Wann do Gott an dem crútze stuond”), 157 (“Do Gottes sun an dem crútze hieng”). Ida of Nivelles spoke to “God,” addressing him as “sweetest Jesus” and asking why he had to endure death on the cross; see Cowley, Send Me God, c. 29b-3, p. 79. 20. ​Ellen K. Rentz, Imagining the Parish in Late Medieval ­England (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2015), 79.

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seen as altogether special cases, w ­ hether their experience is seen as super­ natural or as delusional. It may be useful to look at such reports in terms of a spectrum, a fluid transition r­ unning from presupposition of spiritual presence to intuition and then to perception of that presence. T ­ here is a sense (which ­will need to be discussed) in which presupposition of presence was nearly universal: ­those who recognized Christ as God at least notionally took it for granted that he was ubiquitous. The devout might intuit his presence. The exceptionally devout might claim to have heard or even seen him, and if they persuaded ­others that they had perceived that presence, this said something about them, possibly that they w ­ ere saints. A s­ imple and straightforward version of the argument might be that intuition was what r­ eally occurred and that statements of perception ­were inflated boasts or hagiographic topoi. Perhaps that was the case; it would be difficult to prove. What we can show is that the sources themselves at least sometimes recognize something very much like this fluid transition from presupposition to intuition to perception as a valid model for understanding experience of spiritual presence. ­These first three chapters, dealing with the Christ whose presence is experienced and the ways that experience of Christ becomes represented, the “who” and the “how” of his manifestation, constitute the heart of the book. The following chapters pre­sent a series of corollaries to what is said t­ here, or alternative perspectives on the main themes laid out in ­those chapters. Most importantly, subsequent chapters explore further ways in which the “mystical presence of Christ” is exceptional yet grounded in ordinary religious experience. If we wish to understand the relationship between ordinary and exceptional piety, we must know something about the ways p­ eople prayed to Christ and the relationship between such prayer and experience of his presence. Prayers to Christ, meditations on his historical life, and scripted dialogues with him are all ele­ments in the Christocentric devotion that contextualizes claims about his mystical presence. Chapter 4 surveys t­hese forms of prayer and meditation but argues that it is simpler prayers, interjections, and even repetition of the name “Jesus” that are the strongest links between ordinary piety and exceptional experience. It is crucially impor­tant that t­ hose who reported hearing and even seeing Christ did not generally use rarefied forms of prayer distinctive to them, but used common and often very ­simple prayer formulas. The devotional and liturgical stimuli to intuition and perception of the divine ­were the same devotional, meditative, and liturgical exercises that ­were widely shared by ordinary Christians. Experience of Christ’s presence often occurs in the context of liturgy, which makes pre­sent the Christ who instituted the Eucharist, suffered and died, and ­rose from the dead. The liturgical year further includes feast days that com-

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memorate events from Christ’s life. The liturgy thus provides a context in which the past is made pre­sent and the Christ of biblical narrative becomes manifest. Liturgy and sacrament provide the setting in which Christ is most ordinarily recognized as pre­sent. But as chapter 5 suggests, the cycle of liturgical feasts, which bring back memory of past events, was less impor­tant in our sources than liturgical ser­vices seen as occasions for Christ’s manifestation in the pre­sent. Most of the figures examined in this book are w ­ omen, but some men also spoke about experiencing Christ’s presence: Meister Eckhart, Henry Suso, Walter Hilton, and o ­ thers. As chapter 6 proposes, when men talk about Christ’s presence, they typically have in mind the encounter with a person but not a personality. This distinction opens the book’s main contribution to the exploration of mystical presence as a gendered phenomenon. Chapters 7 and 8 show how the theme of Christ’s recognized presence becomes articulated within the culture and the social dynamics of communities, especially the ­women’s monastery of Helfta and the south German Dominican convents that produced the “sister-­books.” P ­ eople speak of experiencing Christ’s presence in large part ­because they are encouraged to do so and are given pertinent vocabulary by a broader or a more specific community. From the perspective of ­those within ­these communities, the ways that Christ becomes manifest are not simply expressions of communal culture, but ways that Christ enters into that culture, accommodating himself to it to make his presence recognizable. This aspect of his manifestation is most fully developed in the lit­er­at­ ure from Helfta. It is seen in the l­ ater sister-­books as well, but in t­ hose texts the social dynamics that Christ enters into become more prominent. When the presence of Christ becomes a pervasive experience for w ­ omen who live not in community but in the secular world or in reclusion, their experience is most often transmitted in the writings of their confessors. It is from the writings of ­these male companions that we know about the ­women who received the revelation, their personal relationships (often fraught) with Christ, and their sometimes narrow circles of associates. Chapter 9 centers on a particularly in­ter­est­ing case of this sort, that of Dorothea of Montau, and explores some of the complexities of her relationship with her hagiographer and with Christ. In the hagiographic dossier for Dorothea, Christ appears as a kind of disciplinarian regulating her daily life and piety, as a mystical bridegroom, and as a teacher. Dorothea and her hagiographer presumably both accepted all three perspectives on Christ, but ­there is reason to think the perception of Christ as a taskmaster in quotidian affairs comes mainly from Dorothea, while his depiction as mystical bridegroom owes a g­ reat deal to the hagiographer’s

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intervention. ­Because Dorothea exemplifies more fully than any other figure the themes explored in this book, and w ­ ill already be familiar from references to her in ­earlier chapters, this chapter serves as a capstone for the book as a w ­ hole. Speaking of Christ as overtly manifest could, of course, become problematic, as chapter 10 demonstrates. Late medieval Christians ­were keenly aware of the dangers of delusion and self-­deception. The absence of Christ was also a ­factor that complicated a sense of his presence, although his absence in one mode does not preclude his presence in o ­ thers; if t­ here are dif­fer­ent modes of presence, ­there are also dif­fer­ent modes of absence. Chapter 10 discusses how ­these prob­lems are discussed in the sources. Even the preliminary survey given h ­ ere makes clear that the mystical presence of Christ was on the w ­ hole found not only more among w ­ omen than among men but among German w ­ omen in par­tic­u­lar and that w ­ omen connected with the Dominican order w ­ ere perhaps even more predisposed in this direction. German w ­ omen’s ­houses ­were characterized by an e­ ager exchange of texts, by contact with the highly mobile Dominican friars who could mediate cultural exchange, and thus by a collective identity that made it easy for the mystical presence of Christ to become widely established as a cultural phenomenon. But the broader point h ­ ere is the connectedness of ordinary and exceptional religion, so if German w ­ omen’s monasteries seem more prominent than En­glish laity or the affiliates of Italian friars, that is not ­because they are entirely distinctive, but b­ ecause they most fully attest trends that extended throughout the late medieval West.

Sources Used and Sources Not Used The writings examined ­here are highly diverse. Often they ­were in one way or other radically collaborative, involving not only the interaction of subjects and scribes but redactors at vari­ous stages and biographers who blurred the line between hagiography and autohagiography. The diverse forms of collaboration make for considerable variety across the body of texts. The nuns of Helfta talked about revelations, shared revelations, wrote down other nuns’ revelations, and collaborated in their textual enshrinement. In the memorable words of Anna Harrison, the writing from Helfta constitutes “a densely braided chorus of voices, which are so intertwined in the text b­ ecause they ­were so engaged with one another in life.”21 Despite the collaboration, how21. ​Anna Harrison, “ ‘Oh! What Trea­sure Is in This Book?’: Writing, Reading, and Community at the Monastery of Helfta,” Viator 39 (2008): 96; see also Anna Harrison, “Thousands and Thousands of

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ever, ­there was strong pressure within ­later medieval culture to highlight the role of the subject and to privilege the voice of the subject while downplaying the role of ­others in the collaboration. If ­there was a first-­person voice, that of the person to whom Christ was manifested, that was often taken to be the authorial voice even for works in which ­there clearly was multiple authorship.22 We speak of the writings of Margaret Ebner or Margery Kempe, and their contemporaries also tended to focus on their first-­person voices as authorial, even if t­ here is evidence that o ­ thers had a role in the recording or editing of their texts. For one of the texts we w ­ ill draw from, fully six stages of production have been claimed.23 For a study of an individual text or body of texts, it is clearly impor­tant to distinguish whose voice is being heard so far as that is pos­si­ble, although the distinction is in some cases highly speculative. In a work of synthesis such as this, it is still impor­tant to bear in mind that the repre­sen­ta­tion of Christ’s manifestation may owe more to a confessor and biographer than to the subject, and if t­here ­were consistent patterns—if, for example, the subjects usually talked about their experience as a form of ordinary piety, and if biographers routinely converted the ordinary into the exceptional—­that would be especially significant. What we ­will find, however, is a set of themes and variations that do not correlate clearly and consistently with forms of authorship. When t­ here are clear distinctions, for example between hagiography and autobiography, t­ hose must be noted and examined, but the distinctions do not always relate clearly to differences in genre. For all the differences among our sources, most of them—­and the most impor­tant of them—­represent lit­er­a­ture of revelation.24 They primarily rec­ ord the revelatory experiences of individuals represented, with varying degrees Lovers”: Sense of Community among the Nuns of Helfta (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press / Cistercian Publications, 2022), 38. Cf. Margarete Hubrath, Schreiben und Erinnern: Zur “memoria” im Liber specialis gratiae Mechthilds von Hakeborn (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1996), 36–48. 22. ​Balázs Nemes, Von der Schrift zum Buch, von Ich zum Autor: Zur Text-­und Autorkonstitution in Überlieferung und Rezeption des ›Fließenden Lichts der Gottheit‹ Mechthilds von Magdeburg (Tübingen: Francke, 2010), 358–80, discusses numerous examples, not only that of Mechthild of Magdeburg. See also Balázs J. Nemes, “Text Production and Authorship: Gertrude of Helfta’s Legatus divinae pietatis,” in A Companion to Mysticism and Devotion in Northern Germany in the Late M ­ iddle Ages, ed. Elizabeth Andersen (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 120. P. Dinzelbacher, «Revelationes» (Turnhout: Brepols, 1991), 42–57, gives an overview of the modes of texual production. 23. ​Klaus Grubmüller, “Die Viten der Schwestern zu Töss und Elsbeth Stagel (Überlieferung und Einheit),” Zeitschrift für deutsches Altertum und deutsche Literatur, 98 (1969): 201–4. 24. ​On revelations as a genre, see Dinzelbacher, «Revelationes», 16: “Jeder Text, der mit dem Anspruch auftritt, eine unmittelbara Botschaft Gottes (oder seiner Heiligen und Engel) zu verkündigen, gehört zur literarischen Gattung des Offenbarungsschrifttums.” Only a subset of Dinzelbacher’s “revelations” is relevant ­here, the most obvious limitation being the focus on revelations specifically of Christ. As ­will become clear, the texts that Dinzelbacher categorizes as revelations overlap significantly with hagiography and with the collective accounts of the sister-­books.

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of plausibility, as their sources and sometimes their authors. Mystical treatises do not figure prominently in this study. Even hagiography is relevant mainly to the extent that it becomes assimilated to the lit­er­a­ture of revelation. Obviously crucial differences emerge when revelatory experience becomes molded by someone other than the subject, and particularly when the author is a male hagiographer writing about a female subject. How Raymond of Capua dealt with the experience of Catherine of Siena or how Johannes Marienwerder molded the experience of Dorothea of Montau are questions impor­tant for this study. Many of the texts discussed ­here ­were written by and largely for nuns. To some extent the ways of talking about Christ’s presence that we w ­ ill be examining represent the internal discourse of w ­ omen’s religious communities. Any community can to some degree develop ways of speaking that are recognized as characteristic of that community, even constitutive for it, giving its members a sense of communal bonding. The ways a community of nuns speak about Christ may not be unique to them or entirely unconnected to the ways outsiders speak, but when the nuns use the phrases they use and tell the stories they tell about Christ, they expect to be heard and understood by insiders more readily and perhaps differently than they would be heard and understood by outsiders. Gertrude Jaron Lewis speaks of texts that ­were written by ­women, for w ­ omen, and about ­women, and in each case the plural is impor­ tant: the texts do not represent the mentality of “typical” w ­ omen or ­women utterly apart from the men in the broader society, but they do represent the ways ­women tended to write when their subjects and their primary audiences ­were other ­women.25 Still, the discourse of the convents was shared at least sometimes by w ­ omen who ­were not in the community, perhaps in imitation of nuns’ writing, and by male hagiographers of w ­ omen, and sometimes (if seldom) by men writing about themselves. W ­ omen’s religious h ­ ouses w ­ ere vitally impor­tant for cultivating and popularizing the conventions of this discourse and for giving it a reputation as the discourse of religious ­women, although convent language is never only convent language. Their influence was widespread, not least ­because, as Jeffrey Hamburger has said, “for late medieval viewers, as for us, the cloistered ­woman personified piety.”26 25. ​Gertrud Jaron Lewis, By W ­ omen, for ­Women, about ­Women: The Sister-­Books of Fourteenth-­ Century Germany (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1996). Rabia Gregory, in Marrying Jesus in Medieval and Early Modern Northern Eu­rope: Popu­lar Culture and Religious Reform (Farnham: Ashgate, 2016), 172–73, warns that “singling out the material culture of medieval convents as something by and for ­women re­creates the nineteenth-­century ghettoizing of nuns.” But see the formulations of the point in Harrison, “Thousands and Thousands of Lovers,” 7 and 51. 26. ​Hamburger, Nuns as Artists, 112.

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This is, then, largely a study of ­women’s religious experience, but within a more specific and a more general context: first, the context provided by personal networks in which w ­ omen supported each other while clergy served as confessors and biographers, teachers and pupils of holy w ­ omen, affording both protection and control, and promoting their cult and their writings; second, the broader context of a religious culture in which exceptional piety was grounded in the more ordinary religion shared by clergy and laity, ­women and men. Some historians express an interest not so much in “lived sanctity” but rather in “­imagined sanctity,” the ways holy w ­ omen are depicted in the ac27 counts of their lives. To a g­ reat extent I share that approach, but rather than sealing lived and i­magined sanctity off from each other I am particularly interested in noting points of convergence between them. I want to explore how far the repre­sen­ta­tion of religion in the sources corresponds to a plausible recreation of psychological pro­cess, how medieval ways of talking about the presence of Christ sometimes come close to ways we might talk about such experience, how insiders’ and outsiders’ perspectives partially converge, how “­imagined sanctity” helps give insight into “lived sanctity.” The main task is to see what would count as verisimilitude in a late medieval setting. Historical verisimilitude ­will not be the same as what would count for verisimilitude for most in our own culture, but deeper understanding of past criteria should at least make them recognizable from our perspective. The experience investigated ­here can be spoken of as “Christophany,” and another way to think of this book is to say that it studies that phenomenon in texts where that is of primary importance. The word “theophany” is a traditional and well-­known term for manifestations of God, but ­here we ­will speak of Christophany to suggest two complementary and equally impor­tant points: first, that in late medieval narratives it is Christ in par­tic­ul­ ar whose manifestation is most often sought and expected, not the F ­ ather or the undifferentiated deity or godhead; second, that when Christ’s presence is intuited or perceived, his divinity is generally accentuated rather than his humanity, and a Christophany is thus a kind of theophany. “Christophany” is nearly a synonym for “mystical presence,” except that the latter accentuates the ubiquitous presence that can be intuited or perceived, while the former refers more squarely to the ­actual manifestation of that presence. This study focuses on the interweaving of Christ’s presence with everyday life, which is integral to what we are calling his mystical presence. It does not 27. ​John W. Coakley, ­Women, Men, and Spiritual Power: Female Saints and Their Male Collaborators (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 5–6.

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dwell on the occasional or episodic apparitions that had long been a theme in hagiography and was well known in the late medieval West. Christ’s appearing to Saint Anthony (251–356) ­after his temptation in the tombs, or his coming to Saint Martin of Tours (316–397) as a needy beggar and then in a dream, are classic stories, echoed in the life of Catherine of Siena (1347–1380).28 In other hagiographic texts Christ appears to a saint bringing a religious conversion or a call to some vocation, as in the life of Vincent Ferrer (1350–1419).29 Again, incidents of this kind do not in themselves bear on the theme of sustained mystical presence. Similarly, Julian of Norwich (1343–ca. 1416) experienced the presence of Christ in a series of revelations as she lay in critical illness, and she clearly saw awareness of his presence as a fundamental datum of her religious experience, but she did not show him returning again and again in her life. Somewhat differently, accounts of prophetic revelation tend to focus on the prophetic message more than on sustained experience of Christ’s presence amid all the particularities of life. During the G ­ reat Schism of the Western Church (1378–1417), Christophany was sometimes the basis for claims within the sphere of ecclesiastical politics. Christ was a partisan, and he manifested himself not as the familiar companion of a pious soul but as a defender of what was taken to be the true and valid papacy. ­Under ­these circumstances, long familiar notions of Christophany did not simply vanish, but t­here was an alternative context for Christ’s manifestation. Constance of Rabastens (d. 1386) saw visions and heard the voice of Christ in her sleep, but soon her revelations came to focus overtly on current ecclesiastical politics and on the disasters that threatened Christendom.30 Christ gave Ursulina of Parma (d. 1410) visions almost daily and imparted revelations in which he sent her to Avignon to speak with the antipope.31 Her contact with Christ was frequent, but he was not a constant mystical companion in the same way that he was to o ­ thers. 28. ​VCS 1.11.109–10, Kearns, 101–2; VCS 2.3.134–37, Kearns, 129–32. 29. ​Laura Ackerman Smoller, The Saint and the Chopped-­Up Baby: The Cult of Vincent Ferrer in Medieval and Early Modern Eu­rope (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014), 6, 8, 96, 133, 141-42, 162, 164; see also Martha G. Newman, “Crucified by the Virtues: Monks, Lay B ­ rothers, and ­Women in Thirteenth-­ Century Cistercian Saints’ Lives,” in Gender and Difference in the ­Middle Ages, ed. Sharon A. Farmer and Carol Braun Pasternack (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 186 and 192-93. 30. ​Renate Blumenfeld-­Kosinski and Bruce  L. Venarde, eds. and trans., Two W ­ omen of the ­Great Schism: “The Revelations” of Constance de Rabastens by Raymond de Sabanac and “Life of the Blessed Ursulina of Parma” by Simone Zanacchi (Toronto: Center for Reformation and Re­nais­sance Studies, 2010), 38–39 (nos. 1, 3, 5), 41 (nos. 12–13), 42–47 (nos. 16–17, 20–21, 23, 26); Renate Blumenfeld-­Kosinski, Poets, Saints, and Visionaries of the G ­ reat Schism, 1378–1417 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006), 34–35, 61–75, 92–93. 31. ​Blumenfeld-­Kosinski and Venarde, Two ­Women of the G ­ reat Schism, 82–84 (paras. 9, 11–12), 87 (paras. 16), 91–92 (paras. 22–23); Blumenfeld-­Kosinski, Poets, Saints, and Visionaries, 86–89; André Vauchez, The Laity in the M ­ iddle Ages: Religious Beliefs and Devotional Practices, ed. Daniel E. Bornstein, trans Margery J. Schneider (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993), 219–30.

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The emphasis had shifted from the presence manifested to the message conveyed. This book centers, then, on figures of the long ­fourteenth c­ entury—­sometimes a bit ­earlier or ­later—­who reported Christophany as a regular aspect of their religious life and whose reports suggest ways in which they stood out as exceptional yet also ways in which their experiences w ­ ere in continuity with that of more ordinary Christians of their time.

Methodological Princi­ples ­ here is more than one way to approach the connection between the ordinary T and the exceptional. One option is to trace the popu­lar diffusion of mystical writing in the form of generally accessible devotional texts, which Bernard McGinn refers to as “mysticism for the many.”32 Focusing on the specific theme of the soul as the bride of Christ, Rabia Gregory shows how a notion articulated in twelfth-­century texts for nuns became pop­u­lar­ized in late medieval lit­er­a­ ture: not just mystics of high attainment, and not only nuns, but all Christians could become brides of Christ.33 To some extent that approach is relevant to this book, b­ ecause some of the texts examined ­here, especially ­those from the convent at Helfta, reached popu­lar audiences when passages became included in devotional miscellanies.34 Another possibility is to see how religious themes and concerns such as penitence or devotion to Christ’s Passion are shared between the exceptionally pious and ordinary devout Christians and woven into texts of all sorts. My ­earlier book Unquiet Souls dealt with such thematic embeddedness of the exceptional within the ordinary, with key themes in fourteenth-­ century hagiography that can be found as well in broader religious culture, although I was dealing ­there largely with formal hagiography, in which ­there is rarely any suggestion of a fluid continuity between the exceptional and the ordinary. In that ­earlier book I also emphasized how the saints’ piety is often set forth as more to be wondered at than imitated (magis admiranda quam imitanda), but also as urging that if the saints can carry their religion to its extremes, then a fortiori o ­ thers should be capable of ordinary virtue. The emphasis was not on continuity between the saints’ experience of the divine and other ­people’s experience, but on their sharing in a religious culture steeped in the cultivation of 32. ​Bernard McGinn, The Harvest of Mysticism in Medieval Germany (1300–1500) (New York: Crossroad, 2005), 299–483. 33. ​Gregory, Marrying Jesus. 34. ​See especially Racha Kirakosian, From the Material to the Mystical in Late Medieval Piety: The Vernacular Transmission of Gertrude of Helfta’s Visions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021).

16 I n t r o d u c t i o n

patience and penitence and deeply absorbed in the Passion of Christ.35 In the pre­sent book I remain interested in shared religious culture, and I discuss prayers and meditative lit­er­a­ture, liturgical observances, scripted meditations, and images that link the exceptionally vivid sense of Christ’s presence with widely shared attention to Christ. More often, however, the focus ­here is on a subtler f­actor: the distinction between stronger and weaker claims to exceptionality, between cases at one end of the spectrum where the experience of Christ’s presence is clearly privileged and ­those at the other end where it is represented as accessible in princi­ple to all. To a large extent, therefore, this is an inquiry not simply into experience but into claims about experience, and the question is how far accounts of exceptional experience open onto the possibility of continuity with more ordinary piety. ­There was, inevitably, room for ambiguity. We may have a clear sense of the distinction between imitanda and admiranda, the deeds of the saints meant to be imitated and t­ hose set out as occasion for wonderment, but imitanda may be expressed and even experienced as admiranda: ways of experiencing Christ’s presence that might other­wise seem ordinary may be represented as extraordinary ­because they occur to a person of exceptional piety, or they may actually shade into extraordinary experience ­because of the individual’s intense sensibilities and reactions.36 Sensing the presence of Christ is something Christians have in common, but also something that sets some apart from o ­ thers. In the historical sources we may be reading an account of an extraordinary experience, or we may be reading an extraordinary account of a more ordinary one, a dramatization of the everyday. This very ambiguity gives the theme much of its interest. Like many medievalists, I work at the crossroads of disciplines. The figures studied in this book lend themselves to interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary examination, and the scholars who have written about them include historians, theologians, literary specialists, and o ­ thers. I have benefited from the work of colleagues who approach the subject from ­these vari­ous perspectives, and my notes to some extent reflect what I have learned from them. If I do not engage with all of them as deeply as some readers might wish, that is b­ ecause I am ask35. ​Richard Kieckhefer, Unquiet Souls: Fourteenth-­Century Saints and Their Religious Milieu (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). Even when I wrote that book, I found its chapter on “rapture and revelations” to be the least satisfying, and the pre­sent book turns back to explore the themes of that chapter more fully. In other work of mine I have explored the relationship between ordinary and specialized culture in terms of a “common tradition” (defined in a negative sense as beliefs and practices that cannot be assigned to any par­tic­u­lar subgroups) and the culture of vari­ous more specific groups; see Magic in the ­Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), chap. 4. 36. ​Kieckhefer, Unquiet Souls, 13; Caroline Walker Bynum, “Won­der,” American Historical Review 102 (1997): 10–12.

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ing dif­fer­ent questions, and insights that are valuable in themselves and impor­ tant to a dif­fer­ent line of inquiry are not always relevant to my proj­ect. At heart I remain a historian, but in this book I write as a par­tic­ul­ ar kind of historian, concerned chiefly to show how ­things made sense within a specific context. I take note of change over time, and I suggest ­factors within cultural history that help account for that change. I trace how dif­fer­ent voices can be heard in the framing of a text, especially in my chapter on Dorothea of Montau. I ask about the ways the texts reveal conceptions of gender, especially in my discussion of “person and personality” and of Dorothea. I touch lightly on reception history, especially the reception of the lit­er­at­ ure from Helfta. All ­these m ­ atters, however, have been discussed well by other writers, and while they are relevant to my work, they are not central. In the first two chapters I deal with theology, and in the next I discuss psychological pro­cesses as they are suggested in the texts (however closely or distantly the texts mirror what was ­going on in the minds and souls of the subjects), but still I write as a historian making sense of sense-­making, not as a theologian or a psychologist. This study is meant as historical not only in its focus on texts from a specific period but more importantly in its understanding of t­ hese texts as a par­ tic­ul­ar outgrowth of that period’s religious culture, grounded in the same historical conditions as other manifestations of that culture. Late medieval devotionalism no doubt had roots in e­ arlier religious practice, particularly that of the monasteries, but ­there had never been a time when devotional conventions ­were so widespread, so varied in their manifestations, so fully embraced by both religious and laity, so deeply integrated into everyday life, or so thoroughly entwined with networks of communication that cut across bound­aries of language, social status, and religious ­orders. Increasing literacy even among laity was one condition for this devotional revolution. Ready availability of devotional reading ­matter, on affordable paper more than parchment, was another. The cultivated habits of private and ­silent reading and the cultivation of inwardness, or preoccupation with interior thoughts and sensibilities, ­were yet ­others. Some might prefer to think of the minimal practice expected of a Christian, which was not to the same degree historically par­tic­ul­ar, as the ordinary religion of the era.37 The conventions of late medieval devotionalism went beyond the minimum, and it is this emerging devotionalism that serves as the ordinary foil to the more exceptional phenomena discussed in this book.

37. ​On that ­matter, see Norman P. Tanner and Sethina Watson, “Least of the Laity: The Minimum Requirements for a Medieval Christian,” Journal of Medieval History 32, no. 4 (2006): 395–423.

Pa rt O n e

The Subject and Manner of Manifestation

C h a p te r   1

Divine Person, Divine and ­ Human Natures

Kneeling in a chapel, Margery Kempe (ca. 1373– ca. 1438) wept and begged forgiveness for her sins. Christ suddenly came to her, identifying himself as the Christ who died on the cross, then adding, “I the same God forgive you your sins entirely.” Again soon afterward he said, “I am the same God” who brought her sins to mind and caused her to confess them.1 In this passage Christ does not deny his humanity, but he highlights the divinity by which he dances through time, working redemption on the cross at one point, inspiring her contrition at another, but identically the same person in t­ hese and other moments. One of the best known themes in R. W. Southern’s Making of the M ­ iddle Ages is the high medieval shift in focus from the divinity to the humanity of Christ. In their dif­fer­ent ways, Anselm of Canterbury (1033–1109) and Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153) contributed to a “new feeling about the humanity of the Saviour,” opening the way for “a fresh appreciation of the ­human sufferings of the Redeemer,” the figure on the cross now “seen with a new clarity to be that of a Man,” the incidents of his ­human history serving more and more as subject for meditation. The crucifixion had previously evoked a sense of remote and majestic divine power, but the focus now was 1. ​BMK 1.5 (Windeatt, 51).

21

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“the extreme limits of h ­ uman suffering.”2 The theme has been taken up by many historians since Southern wrote in the 1950s; indeed, it has become a commonplace in the lit­er­a­ture.3 Sometimes the shift or its intensification is ascribed largely to the Franciscans, with their loving attention to the infancy and the death of Christ, his helplessness in the manger, and his agony on the cross. The l­ater medieval emphasis on Christ’s humanity is so generally acknowledged that it seems perhaps incontrovertible. One reason that the humanity of Christ has loomed large in scholarly lit­ er­at­ ure is the recognition that writers of the l­ater medieval West, mainly but not exclusively ­women, saw themselves as sharing in Christ’s suffering. Their own sufferings, physical and sometimes also interpersonal, ­were means by which they w ­ ere assimilated to Christ in his Passion.4 The extreme case was the stigmatic, who bore the wounds of Christ on his or her own flesh. But while it was the assumed ­human nature that made Christ’s suffering pos­si­ble, it was the eternally divine person who bore that suffering. In this re­spect, participation in the experience of Christ was dif­fer­ent in princi­ple from sharing in the suffering of the martyrs or in that of a friend. B ­ ecause God assumed ­human nature, it was pos­si­ble for a ­human to share in the suffering of God. Margery Kempe, one of the most striking exemplars of late medieval affective piety, refers to Christ as “God.” She does so not only in the passage cited 2. ​R. W. Southern, The Making of the M ­ iddle Ages (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953), 234, 236, 240. In his ­later book, Medieval Humanism and Other Studies (Oxford: Blackwell, 1970), 36, Southern speaks of “the humanity of God” (36) as the predominant theme from the twelfth c­ entury on. But it is his ­earlier formulation that has become the commonly accepted view. 3. ​E.g., Ewert Cousins, “The Humanity and the Passion of Christ,” in Christian Spirituality, ed. Jill Raitt (New York: Crossroad, 1987), 2:375–91; Gertrud Jaron Lewis, By ­Women, for W ­ omen, about ­Women: The Sister-­Books of Fourteenth-­Century Germany (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1996), 110, 137; Carolyn Dinshaw, “Margery Kempe,” in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval ­Women’s Writing, ed. Carolyn Dinshaw and David Wallace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 233–34; Michelle Karnes, Imagination, Meditation, and Cognition in the M ­ iddle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 115; Nigel F. Palmer, “ ‘Antiseusiana’: Vita Christi and Passion Meditation before the Devotio Moderna,” in Inwardness, Individualization, and Religious Agency in the Late Medieval Low Countries: Studies in the “Devotio Moderna” and Its Contexts, ed. Rijcklof Hofman, Charles Caspers, Peter Nissen, Mathilde van Dijk, and Johan Oosterman (Turnhout: Brepols, 2020), 87. Prior to Southern, the theme had been raised in French lit­er­a­ture, including Felix Vernet, Mediæval Spirituality, trans. the Benedictines of Talacre (St.  Louis: Herder, 1930), 89–98 (“Devotion to the Sacred Humanity”), especially 90 (“This is the characteristic of the spiritual life of the ­Middle Ages; loving devotion to the Sacred Humanity”). Pierre Rousselot and Joseph Huby, “Chris­tian­ity in the M ­ iddle Ages,” in The Life of the Church, ed. Pierre Rousselot, Léonce de Grandmaison, Joseph Huby, Alexandre Brou, and Martin Cyril D’Arcy (London: Sheed & Ward, 1932), 184 and 186, are more nuanced in their formulation but might also have encouraged formulations such as Southern’s. 4. ​This is a theme of my book Unquiet Souls: Fourteenth-­Century Saints and Their Religious Milieu (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 89–121 (chap. 4, “Devotion to the Passion”), but far more importantly of Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval ­Women (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987).

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above but habitually. When speaking to her, he may refer to his incarnation, his Passion, or his suffering, but still he is “God.” Nor is Kempe at all exceptional for her age. The same is true, in fact, for most of the figures dealt with in this book. Mechthild of Hackeborn and Gertrude the ­Great address Christ as “God.” The divinity of Christ is crucially impor­tant for the Dominican nuns of the era and for the anchoress Dorothea of Montau. In the poetry and drama of the era, as well, one often finds that it is “God” lying in the manger or hanging on the cross. That the eucharistic host was the “body of God” was usage of long standing and still current.5 An hôtel-­Dieu was understood to be dedicated to Christ.6 That “God” could mean “Christ” and that Christ was spoken of as “God” w ­ ere simply commonplace usages.7 But surely the meditative lit­er­at­ure, with its absorption in the life and Passion of Christ, focuses squarely on his humanity? No, it does not. The Pseudo-­ Bonaventuran Meditationes vitae Christi (Meditations on the Life of Christ) has a chapter discussing what it means to contemplate Christ’s ­human nature, but the focus t­ here is more on the relationship between contemplation and meditation than on his humanity itself.8 Elsewhere the “­human nature” or “humanity” of Christ scarcely receives explicit mention in that text. ­There is a g­ reat deal in it regarding the suffering that was made pos­si­ble by Christ’s assumption of ­human nature, but when the question of nature arises, the author explic­itly invites the reader to ponder the implications of that suffering both for the humanity and for the divinity.9 Jaime Vidal has done a searching analy­sis of the 5. ​Venerabilis Beda, “In S. Joannis evangelium expositio,” c. 2, in Opera omnia, vol. 3 (Patrologia latina, vol. 92) (Paris: Migne, 1862), col. 665D; Hildebertus Cenomanensis, “Brevis tractatus de sacramento altaris,” in Patrologia latina, vol. 171 (Paris: Migne, 1854), col. 1151B. For l­ater medieval usage, see, for example, VCH c. 31, trans. p. 36, and c. 36, p. 42; Paradisus anime intelligentis (Paradis der fornuftigen sele), aus der Oxforder Handschrift Cod. Laud. Misc. 479 nach E. Sievers’ Abschrift, ed. Philipp Strauch (Berlin: Weidmann, 1919), 31, 55 (seven times), 56, 106, 136 (four times) (Eucharist as “Godis lichame/ lichamen/lichamin”); Lewis, By ­Women, for ­Women, about ­Women, 155 (the consecrated host referred to as “got selbs”) and 174; Wendy Pfeffer, “The Dit des monstiers,” Speculum 73 (1998): 85, 91 (“La repose li cors Dieu”). John Mirk’s Festial, edited from British Library MS Cotton Claudius A.II, ed. Susan Powell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 1:154–60, in a sermon for Corpus Christi, refers to “Christ’s body” five times, replicating the name of the feast, but to “God’s body” thirteen times, including a reference to the priest’s capacity “to make God’s body,” chiefly in the context of miracle narratives. 6. ​For a striking example, see Barbara Newman, Medieval Crossover: Reading the Secular against the Sacred (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013), 272–87, especially 202, 276–77, for “La Desputoison de Dieu et de sa mère / The Dispute between God and His ­Mother,” where again “God” means Christ. 7. ​For in­ter­est­ing Scandinavian evidence, see Birgit Sawyer, The Viking-­Age Rune-­Stones: Custom and Commemoration in Early Medieval Scandinavia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 140. 8. ​Bonaventura, Meditationes vitae Christi, c. 51, in Opera (Rome: Typographia Vaticana, 1596), 6: 388–89; John of Caulibus, Meditations on the Life of Christ, trans. Francis X. Taney, et al. (Asheville, NC: Pegasus, 2000), c. 51, pp. 175–77. 9. ​Bonaventura, Meditationes vitae Christi, c. 77, pp. 404–5; Bonaventura, Meditations, 249.

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divinity and humanity in the Meditations, particularly in the account of Christ’s infancy. He suggests that scholastic theologians had difficulty fully accepting the implications of Christ’s humanity: that he could genuinely fear, that he could be ignorant, that he could learn ­things other than by gaining in one mode knowledge he already had in another.10 A meditative writer giving an imaginative depiction faced the prob­lem acutely. Thus, the Meditations speak of Christ as an infant having real blood and shedding real tears, but as choosing to cry, ­because beneath his flesh he had a mind that shared less with a h ­ uman baby than with the eternal Word. His h ­ uman personality, Vidal suggests, is “for all practical purposes absorbed” by the Word. The Meditations on the Life of Christ are not unusual in this regard. Other devotional texts too speak of “the birth of God almighty” and refer to God as ­dying on the tree, or God as riding an ass on Palm Sunday, or God as working the miracle at Cana or being laid in the tomb.11 A prayer that addresses Jesus as “so soft and so sweet,” expresses yearning to be his lover, and asks, “Why do I not kiss you sweetly in my spirit with the sweet memory of your good deeds?” can, with no hint of incongruity, be entitled “An Orison to God Almighty.”12 When texts lying on the border between devotion and magic also identify Christ as God, they are following the conventions of the age.13 10. ​Jaime R. Vidal, “The Infancy Narrative in Pseudo-­Bonaventure’s Meditationes Vitae Christi: A Study in Medieval Franciscan Christ-­Piety (c. 1300),” PhD diss., Fordham University, 1984. For further discussion of t­ hese issues, see Kevin Madigan, The Passions of Christ in High-­Medieval Thought: An Essay on Christological Development (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). 11. ​Walter Sauer, ed., The Metrical Life of Christ, ed. from MS BM Add. 39996 (Heidelberg: Winter, 1977), 31, l.196, l.237; 35, l.525; 40, ll.974–75; 45, ll.1380–81; 67, ll.3206–09; Arnd Reitemeier, “Man hat Gott vnd alle Allte Christenliche Ordnung lieb gehabt vnd geüffert . . . : Kultur in der Pfarrkirche—­ Identifi kation mit der Pfarrkirche in der Stadt des späten Mittelalters,” in Pfarreien in der Vormoderne: Identität und Kultur im Niederkirchenwesen Europas, ed. Michele C. Ferrari and Beat Kümin (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2017), 157 (“Vnnser Herrgott uff dem Essel”); Richard Rolle, The En­glish Writings, trans. and ed. Rosamund S. Allen (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist, 1989), 192; Anna Dlabačová, “Illustrated Incunabula as Material Objects: The Case of the Devout Hours on the Life and Passion of Jesus Christ,” in Inwardness, Individualization, and Religious Agency in the Late Medieval Low Countries: Studies in the “Devotio Moderna” and Its Contexts, ed. Rijcklof Hofman, Charles Caspers, Peter Nissen, Mathilde van Dijk, and Johan Oosterman (Turnhout: Brepols, 2020), 212 (again “God” entering Jerusalem on donkey); John of Joinville, The Life of St. Louis, bk. 1, c. 4, trans. René Hague (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1955), 29 (God’s foot-­washing on Maundy Thursday). See also John Mirk’s Festial, 1:104 (“be ʒe nowte vnkynde to ʒowre Godde þat þus suffrud for ʒow”) and 1:117 (“orybul oþus be Goddys blode and hys sydus and v[m]breydon God of hys passioun”). 12. ​Anne Savage and Nicholas Watson, trans., Anchoritic Spirituality: Ancrene Wisse and Associated Works (New York: Paulist, 1991), 322–23. 13. ​See, for example, Liber iuratus Honorii: A Critical Edition of the Latin Version of the Sworn Book of Honorius, ed. Gösta Hedegård (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 2002), 61 (“In nomine igitur Domini nostri Ihesu Christi, vivi et veri Dei”); Julien Véronèse, L’Ars notoria au Moyen Age: Introduction et édition critique (Florence: Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2007), 140; and John of Morigny, Liber florum celestis doctrine, or Book of the Flowers of Heavenly Teaching: The New Compilation, with In­de­pen­dent Portions of the Old Compilation: An Edition and Commentary, ed. Claire Fanger and Nicholas Watson (Toronto: PIMS

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­There is clear biblical pre­ce­dent for this usage. ­Toward the end of John’s gospel (20:24–29), the apostle Thomas doubts the resurrection of Christ but is then invited to place his hand in the wound in Christ’s side. The narrative shows Christ risen not just spiritually but physically. It is a polemic against a docetist interpretation: Christ does not just seem incarnate, and does not only seem to have risen bodily from the tomb, but is actually pre­sent in the flesh. One might expect Thomas to respond by recognizing that he is faced with the incarnate and thus h ­ uman Christ. B ­ ecause he is placing his hand into an open wound, one might think he would recognize the suffering occasioned by that wound. But at just that moment what we have is instead the only place in the Bible where Christ is not only spoken of but addressed as God. When Thomas says, “My Lord and my God,” he surely does not mean to say that Christ is divine and not h ­ uman, or that in d­ ying and rising he has lost his h ­ uman nature, but he addresses him as divine. As in the gospel story of Thomas, so too in late medieval sources the divinity of Christ is sometimes most clearly expressed in the way he is addressed. Veronica Negroni da Binasco (1445–1497) one day missed the office of none in her convent chapel ­because (we are told) she was in her cell singing the entire office along with Christ. At one point Christ told her to say something, and she replied, “My God, I do not know and cannot now say this.” But then Christ himself, “the immortal God,” taught her what he wanted her to know.14 Modes of address are courtesies, and courtesy to Christ involves recognition of his highest and not lowliest status, the divinity he holds in eternity rather than the humanity he assumed in time. ­Later medieval sources cannot be counted on to approach the question of Christ’s divinity and humanity in ways that would be familiar to a modern reader. Gertrude of Helfta (1256–1302) once heard the F ­ ather and Son joined in a duet, with the ­Father “in his divinity” singing treble and the Son “in his humanity” taking a lower tone.15 What could this mean? Christ’s ascension into heaven was bodily, so he would have a ­human body with which to sing, and presumably Gertrude means to signal the harmony of the F ­ ather’s disincarnate and the Son’s incarnate song. But surely none of this is what Southern and o ­ thers have had in mind in speaking of a l­ater medieval emphasis on the humanity of Christ. 2015), 184 (“Oratio prima ad Deum”), 213 (“magnus et omnipotens Deus omnium: domine Ihesu Christe”), 218 (“Mirabilis Deus . . . ​domine Ihesu Christe”), and 222 (“Lux mundi, Deus et Pater im­ mense, Pater eternitatis . . . ​domine Ihesu Christe, spera intelligibilis cuius centrum vbique, circumferencia nusquam . . . ​gloriose Deus, per quem creantur omnia”). 14. ​VVB 2.30.36, p. 900. 15. ​LDP 4.58.7, p. 285 (Barratt, 285).

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What we find in ­these and other sources is emphasis not on the humanity but on the divinity of Christ, precisely in an age that seems profoundly devoted to his suffering and ­eager to share in his pains. On the one hand ­there is much attention to the vulnerability and suffering of Christ; on the other he is constantly spoken of and addressed as God, and his divine attributes are routinely emphasized. How can this apparent contradiction be resolved—or can it? Strictly speaking, it is not incorrect to say that ­later medieval piety focused on the humanity of Christ, ­because many sources do focus on the suffering that Christ experienced by virtue of his assumed h ­ uman nature. Still, t­here is something missing in the standard narrative—­namely, an awareness of how in many ­later medieval texts the divine nature of Christ balanced, sometimes overshadowed, and sometimes fused with the h ­ uman nature; and a recognition of how impor­tant it was for virtually all ­these sources that the divine person underlay both the divine and the h ­ uman nature. The divine person (“God”) took on flesh and suffered, and the divine person (again “God”) was assumed pre­sent to devout souls and available for communication with them. ­There may have been increasing emphasis in ­later medieval religion on the suffering Christ experienced by virtue of his ­human nature, but in effect this was accompanied and contextualized by recognition of his divine person. The reason for saying “in effect” is that t­hose who spoke and wrote about Christ may not always have been consciously reflecting the classic doctrine that Christ had two natures in a single person, and they may not have been meaning to pass judgment on the sense in which the person was “divine.” Nonetheless, they ­were giving expression to the same notions about Christ that w ­ ere enshrined in doctrine articulated by early councils and taken over by Scholastic theologians: (1) that he was the eternal and eternally divine Word or Son of God; (2) that he “came down” and became incarnate, fully assuming a ­human nature while retaining the divine nature he had in eternity; (3) that the “he” in ­these two statements was the same, referring to the single person who acted and was acted upon by virtue of the one or the other nature. A further princi­ple that may seem confusing but is also grounded in the theology of the early councils is (4) that this eternal person could be spoken of as divine or as “God” even when his action or situation was a consequence of the ­human nature he had assumed. A medieval writer’s understanding of Christ cannot be seen as simply a balancing of his divine and h ­ uman natures. Modern popu­lar understanding often tends ­toward a kind of zero-­sum Christology, in which any increase in emphasis on Christ’s humanity means a decrease in stress on his divinity, but this approach is faithful neither to classical nor to medieval views of Christ. Most basically, this way of speaking neglects the fundamental doctrine that

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both natures are ascribed to the single person of Christ. It is the person who is eternally divine and who within time assumes a h ­ uman nature. It is the person who acts and is acted upon. This theological formulation makes sense of the apostle Thomas’s exclamation. The point should not seem difficult to grasp, b­ ecause it is largely a m ­ atter of common linguistic usage: no one would say “my ­human nature is suffering from a serious illness”; one would say “I am suffering a serious illness.” It is the person, Christ’s or anyone ­else’s, who acts and is acted upon. In the case of Christ, his ­human nature makes physical suffering pos­si­ble, but it is still the person who suffers.16 The doctrine that Christ has a single person in two natures, divine and ­human, and that he was thus truly divine and truly h ­ uman, was articulated by the Council of Chalcedon in 451. But already at the Council of Ephesus in 431 the relationship between the humanity and the divinity of Christ had been debated. The patriarch of Alexandria, Cyril, asserted that Mary could properly be called the b­ earer of God, the Theotokos, which in Latin would be Dei genitrix, and by extension mater Dei, or God’s ­mother. The patriarch of Constantinople, Nestorius, insisted that she could be called the ­bearer of Christ but not of God. It is the deliberations at Ephesus that are most relevant for our purposes, ­because a key issue was the sense in which one could speak of Christ as “God” even with reference to what he does pertaining to his humanity. It might have seemed inappropriate (as it did to Nestorius) to speak of Christ as God when referring specifically to his being born of a ­woman and taking on ­human nature. But if it was not the eternal and eternally divine Word who entered into humanity by being born of a ­woman, then the incarnate Christ must be a distinct person or agent from that eternal Word. In the words 16. ​St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiæ, part 3, qu. 2, art. 3, corpus, in vol. 48, trans. R. J. Hennessey (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1976), 48–51: “To the hypostasis [or person] alone are attributed the operations and properties of the nature and all that pertains to the nature in the concrete. If, therefore, t­here ­were in Christ some hypostasis other than the hypostasis of the Word, it would follow that ­those ­things related to his ­human condition . . . ​would be verified of someone other than the Word,” which was condemned by the Council of Ephesus. To be sure, ­there is an alternative formulation in “The Letter of Pope Leo I to Flavian, Bishop of Constantinople, about Eutyches,” in Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, ed. Norman P. Tanner (London: Sheed & Ward; Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1990), 1:77–82, in which Leo asserts the distinction of natures in opposition to the teachings of Eutyches. In one key passage (79) Leo says that the Word or divine nature works what is proper to it (“verbo scilicet operante quod verbi est”), while the flesh or ­human nature does what pertains to it (“carne exequente quod carnis est”), each nature (“forma”) being in communion with the other (“cum alterius communione”). Soon afterward (80) he allows that the “son of man” came down from heaven, while the “Son of God” took flesh and was crucified, but he suffered not “in the divinity itself ” (“in divinitate ipsa”) but “in the weakness of the h ­ uman nature” (“in naturae humanae . . . ​infirmitate”), and ­here Leo speaks of the single person with two natures as the subject of the incarnation and passion. In this latter passage the preposition “in” can be construed as having the force of “by virtue of ”: it is the person who suffers by virtue of his or her h ­ uman nature. ­Whether the ­earlier passage can be read the same way, in light of the latter, is a m ­ atter of interpretation.

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of Cyril of Alexandria, “­Because the holy virgin bore in the flesh God who was united hypostatically with the flesh, for that reason we call her ­mother of God, not as though the nature of the Word had the beginning of its existence from the flesh . . . ​but ­because . . . ​he united to himself hypostatically the ­human and underwent a birth according to the flesh from her womb.”17 For Cyril, as for other early theologians, it was not only the entry into the ­human condition but the suffering and death that could be predicated of the divine Word. It was not the divine nature that suffered and died; rather, the eternally divine person was subject to suffering and death by means of the ­human nature that he assumed. In one of his responses to Nestorius, Cyril clarified that the Word of God did not suffer and die in Christ’s own divine nature but is said to have suffered and died b­ ecause of the flesh he assumed.18 The implications of this doctrine ­were worked out by ­later theologians, of whom John of Damascus was particularly impor­tant ­because his teachings w ­ ere taken up in the medieval West by Peter Lombard and then served as a basis for ­later Christology. One radical formulation was that of William of Ockham, who gave theological justification for the statement that “a h ­ uman being created the stars.”19 ­Later theologians such as Gabriel Biel would ascribe to homo Christus, “the h ­ uman being Christ,” qualities we might assume w ­ ere proper to the divine nature, but the point was that they pertained not to ­either nature but rather to the person.20 However striking the formulations, they rest on a premise that was 17. ​Tanner, Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, 1:58 (Council of Ephesus), and 1:83–87, esp. 86 (Council of Chalcedon). Translations are by Anthony Meredith (for Ephesus) and Robert Butterworth (for Chalcedon). 18. ​Tanner, Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, 1:42, 53. See J. N. D. Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines (London: Black, 1965), 143, for parallels as far back as Ignatius of Antioch. For discussion of the broader context, see Paul Gavrilyuk, The Suffering of the Impassible God: The Dialectics of Patristic Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Kevin Madigan, The Passions of Christ in High-­Medieval Thought: An Essay on Christological Development (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 51–62, shows that the pretense of continuity between early and medieval theology of Christ’s suffering is misleading: Hilary of Poitiers had argued that Christ suffered only objectively (i.e., he was wounded), not subjectively (i.e., with psychological effect), but high medieval theologians, finding that interpretation problematic, read him as making other distinctions, such as that Christ suffered in his ­human but not in his divine nature. 19. ​Ockham, Reportatio III, qu. I H, in Opera plurima, vol. 4 (Lyons, 1494–1496; repr. London: Gregg, 1962), unpaginated; Marilyn McCord Adams, “Relations, Inherence and Subsistence: Or, Was Ockham a Nestorian in Christology?,” Nous 16 (1982): 68. The relationship between the two natures inhering in a single person became a point of controversy among Protestant Reformers, who took differing positions regarding the “communication of attributes” or communicatio idiomatum. See Richard Cross, “Communicatio idiomatum”: Reformation Christological Debates (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019); and Robert W. Jenson, “Christ in the Trinity: Communicatio idiomatum,” in The Person of Christ, ed. Murray Rae and Stephen R. Holmes (London: Clark, 2005), 61–69. 20. ​Gabriel Biel, Lecture 50, Canonis misse expositio, ed. Heiko A. Oberman and William J. Courtenay (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1963–1976), 2:275–76G (“homo christus est persona verbi et ita deus”). ­These issues have been much discussed in recent analy­sis of the ways Martin Luther appropriated scholastic Christology. The theological implications for the scholastic theologians are worked out with par­tic­u­lar

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not controversial: that it is the person of Christ who acts, not his natures. It would have been incorrect to say “a ­human nature created the stars,” but if “a ­human being” is understood to refer to the person of Christ who acted in creation and then assumed a ­human nature, the statement becomes a striking version of a position that is commonly taken for granted.21 The person who woke up and ate his breakfast, the person who wept for Lazarus, the person who hung on the cross, and the person who created the stars are all the same person, ­whether he is referred to as “Jesus,” “Christ,” or any other name or title. Thus, the Meditations on the Life of Christ do not ascribe to Christ more divinity than humanity or the reverse, and do not absorb his humanity in his divinity, but recognize that every­thing the person Christ does is done by a single person; ­whether it is done by virtue of his divine or his h ­ uman nature, it is always done not by ­either nature but by the person who bears both natures. ­Those who write about late medieval interest in the humanity of Christ surely do realize that the ­human nature was seen as assumed by an eternally divine person. ­There is nothing novel, let alone polemical, in calling attention to that basic theological conviction. Yet it does bear emphasizing, ­because scholarly attention to the suffering made pos­si­ble by Christ’s humanity has made it harder to see not only that but also why and how the divine person and nature ­were impor­tant. If ­either “the h ­ uman being Christ” or “Christ God” can be taken as pointing to the person who bears both natures, why do the sources dealt with in this book, and indeed so many other ­later medieval sources, prefer versions of the latter designation? If they are using “God” as shorthand for “God incarnate” or “the God-­man,” why do they use a term that privileges his divinity? Three f­actors come into consideration, which we might speak of as the articulation of priority, the intensification of paradox and heightening of pathos, and the explanation of presence. If Christ is the Word of God, the second person of the Trinity, Son of the ­Father, who has “come down” from heaven and taken on h ­ uman nature, the thoroughness and nuance by Aaron Moldenhauer in “Luther’s Doctrine of Christ: Language, Metaphysics, Logic,” PhD diss., Northwestern University, 2019, esp. 243, 278. I am grateful to Moldenhauer for the references to Ockham and Biel, and more generally for his work in contextualizing ­later medieval Christology in its theological tradition. A key term for Moldenhauer is “hypostatic agency,” the agency of the hypostasis in which divinity and humanity both inhere. Pending publication of Moldenhauer’s work, the reader may wish to consult David J. Luy, Dominus Mortis: Martin Luther on the Incorruptibility of God in Christ (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2014), although Luy does not examine the scholastics with the same depth as Moldenhauer. 21. ​Cf. St Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiæ, part 3, qu. 2, art. 7, reply obj. 3, in vol. 48, pp. 68–69: “A man is called God and is God b­ ecause of the u ­ nion in that it is achieved within a divine hypostasis” (terminatur ad hypostasim divinam). In Summa theologiæ, pt. 1, qu. 46, art. 1 ad 8, in vol. 8, trans. Thomas Gilby (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1967), 74–75, Thomas says God is prior to the world by a priority not of time but of eternity.

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obvious implication is that his divine nature is prior to his ­human nature. This is not to say ­there is anything lacking in the ­human nature he assumes; at the incarnation he takes on a h ­ uman soul, mind, w ­ ill, and body, but they are assumed by a person who has previously and eternally been divine. In this sense the eternal person is called a “divine person,” as Thomas Aquinas says, or more strictly the person who is eternally divine,22 even in a text that speaks emphatically of the suffering he undergoes by virtue of the ­human nature he has assumed.23 Even when he lies in the manger or hangs on the cross, he remains the divine person or “God.” This is essentially the Christology of Chalcedonian orthodoxy, taken over and developed by John of Damascus and then the Scholastics. That Christ’s divine nature holds priority to his h ­ uman nature is reinforced in the theology of Thomas Aquinas, who adds an ontological slant to the theological teaching: in Christ t­here is only one act of existence, that of the eternal Son of God; t­ here is not a second act of existence ascribed to his humanity. In fifteenth-­century debate, Christ’s ­human nature might at times be taken to have its own being apart from that of his divine nature, but the response given in the tradition of Thomas was that the h ­ uman nature of Christ, while it has its “being of essence” (esse essentiae), does not have a “being of existence” (esse existentiae) other than that already possessed by the divine person who enters into ­human nature.24 The second ­factor is more relevant to devotional texts centered on the historical life of Christ than to theology proper. In devotional lit­er­a­ture of the ­later medieval West, a further reason to speak of Christ as “God” is to highlight the paradox of Christ’s Passion and heighten the pathos of his earthly 22. ​The most fundamental point ­here, that the “divine person” assumed a ­human nature, is explicit in St.  Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiæ, part 3, qu. 2, art. 8, corpus, in vol. 48, pp.  70–71: “­human nature was conjoined to the divine person in such a way that the divine person subsists in it” (humana natura adjuncta est ad personalitatem divinam, ut scilicet persona divina in humana natura subsistat). See also art. 12, corpus, pp. 84–85: “his ­human nature was conjoined to the divine person” (fuit natura humana divinæ personæ unita [corrected from unitæ]). On Thomas’s understanding of the ­union of two natures in one hypostasis or person, see Paul Gondreau, “The Humanity of Christ, the Incarnate Word,” in The Theology of Thomas Aquinas, ed. Rik Nieuwenhove and Joseph Wawrykow (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005), 252–75; Michael M. Gorman, “Metaphysische Themen in der Christologie (S.th. III, qq. 1–59),” in Thomas von Aquin: Die Summa theologiae: Werkinterpretationen, ed. Andreas Speer (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2005), 377–400; and Thomas V. Morris, “St. Thomas on the Identity and Unity of the Person of Christ: A Prob­lem of Reference in Christological Discourse,” Scottish Journal of Theology 35 (1982): 419–30. 23. ​See the eloquent commentary on this point by John Henry Newman in Select Treatises of St. Athanasius in Controversy with the Arians, 2nd. ed. (London: Pickering, 1881), 2:426–27. 24. ​Maarten J. F. M. Hoenen, “Tradition and Renewal: The Philosophical Setting of Fifteenth-­ Century Christology: Heymericus de Campo, Nicolaus Cusanus, and the Cologne Quaestiones vacantiales (1465),” in Christ Among the Medieval Dominicans: Repre­sen­ta­tions of Christ in the Texts and Images of the Order of Preachers, ed. Kent Emery and Joseph Peter Wawrykow (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1998), 462–92.

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life. It may be heart-­rending to read of a mere mortal who is born into misery and unjustly killed, but it is all the more so if the one undergoing this experience is God, the one worthy of adoration but subject instead to the worst forms of abuse. Thus, the Meditations on the Life of Christ urge the reader to think of the divine Christ during his Passion: Return now to his divinity and think of that im­mense and eternal, incomprehensible and imperial Majesty incarnate, bending humbly to the floor, stooping and collecting his clothing, and with reverence and blushing, dressing himself the same as if he ­were the lowliest of men. No, rather like a kind of hired slave, placed u ­ nder their direction and being corrected and punished by them for some misconduct.25 The vita of Christina of Hane, too, speaks of how “the mighty God, who clothes all the angels with his light, lay as a small child wrapped up in poor linen in the manger.”26 The same point is made in late medieval lyr­ics. To take merely one small example: This infant lying in poverty, In ragged wrappings pent, Uncomfortably, meanly bound— From heaven he is sent.27 The image of the infant Christ lying in a manger, taken from Luke’s gospel (2:7, 12, 16), is fused ­here with the theme from John’s gospel that the eternal divine person came down from heaven (3:13, 6:38, 51). That fusion of perspectives was so deeply ingrained in medieval Christian culture, devotional and theological, that it was nearly impossible not to think of the person lying in the manger or hanging on the cross as the divine person who had come down from heaven—or, in other words, as God. A miniature in the breviary of Katharina Muffel, nun of Saint Katharine in Nürnberg, makes the point in visual idiom (figure 2). The s­ ister kneels in front of an altar with an open triptych that shows an empty cross, and a book of prayers lies open before the triptych, but the ­sister is turned away from both painting and book to focus with folded hands on a vision of Christ robed, bleeding copiously, with hands crossed, as when displayed by Pontius Pilate. But the figure of Christ is held aloft by four brightly colored angels who define a kind of mandorla around the suffering body and display it for adoration. Christ is 25. ​John of Caulibus, Meditations on the Life of Christ, c. 77, p. 249. 26. ​VCH c. 2 (trans. p. 2). 27. ​Brian Stone, trans., Medieval En­glish Verse (Harmonds­worth, UK: Penguin, 1964), 32.

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Figure 2.  Katharina Muffel’s vision of Christ as the Man of Sorrows in a mandorla, from the breviary of Katharina Muffel of Eschenau, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek München, Cgm 177, fol. XII verso, ca. 1500.

the suffering man of the ecce homo, a Man of Sorrows, but he is shown as also a deity, appearing in a mandorla with attendant angels positioned like the angels or living creatures integral to the iconography of Christ in Majesty.28 It is as if 28. ​On the iconography of Christ in Majesty, see especially Gertrud Schiller, Ikonographie der christlichen Kunst (Gütersloh: Mohn, 1971), 3:233-49, for an overview. See also Michel Fromaget, Majestas Domini: Les quatre vivants de l’Apocalypse dans l’art (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003); Herbert L. Kessler, “ ‘Hoc visibile imaginatum figurat illud invisibile verum’: Imaging God in Pictures of Christ,” in Seeing the Invisible in Late Antiquity and the Early ­Middle Ages, ed. Giselle de Nie, Karl F. Marrison, and Marco Mostert (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005), 291–325; and Ilka S. Minneker, “Repräsentation und sakrale Legitimation: Majestas Domini und Bürgermedaillons im Heilig-­Geist-­Hospital zu Lübeck,” Zeitschrift des Vereins für Lübeckische Geschichte und Altertumskunde 79 (1999): 56-58.

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the angels are saying, “Look at what your God was made to suffer!”—­a message far more power­ful than that of any mortal suffering. One aspect of this heightened sense of paradox is the notion, troubling for modern sensibilities, that divine love and compassion are revealed specifically in sacrificial suffering and death. For Ellen Ross, building in part on Elaine Scarry’s interpretation of the “wounded” Deity, late medieval fascination with the suffering of Christ, far from manifesting a fixation on his humanity, was impor­tant precisely b­ ecause it was in “the physicality of the wounded Jesus” that the divine was most sharply manifested. What captivated late medieval Christians was “the miracle that God became embodied in order to suffer on behalf of humanity”: God suffered, wept, and bled “to manifest the boundless mercy of divine compassion,” and the blood of Christ is “the love of God literally poured out onto the witnesses of this suffering.”29 For our purposes, however, a third f­actor is yet more relevant than e­ ither priority or paradox: it is by virtue of his divinity that Christ is ubiquitously pre­sent. That he assumed ­human nature within time and that he retained it when he ascended bodily into heaven could be taken for granted. But if it was his ­human nature that enabled him to suffer, it was as God that he was able to be or to become pre­sent at any point in postbiblical history. A Dominican mystic from the circle of Meister Eckhart preached a sermon on the question “Where is he who was born king of the Jews?” (Matthew 2:2), in which he reflected on Christ’s presence in the sacrament, on the location of Christ’s soul between his death and resurrection, but then on the intimate and power­ful presence of God within all t­ hings, particularly in good p­ eople with the grace that moves their understanding and ­will.30 The sermon might be read as shifting focus from the location of Christ to that of God, but the point is that Christ is ubiquitously pre­sent specifically as God. He was pre­sent in vari­ous modes: sacramentally, in the consecrated bread and wine; ecclesially, in the Church as his mystical body; vicariously, in the needy whose care or neglect was the criterion for distinguishing the sheep from the goats; morally, by grace; mystically, as the bridegroom in relationship with his brides. He might be pre­sent in one mode but not o ­ thers. He might be experienced in one mode but not o ­ thers. He could be pre­sent in some modes while absent in o ­ thers. In any case, it was ­because he was divine that he was necessarily ubiquitous and thus guaranteed pre­sent even when his presence was hidden. 29. ​Ellen  M. Ross, The Grief of God: Images of the Suffering Jesus in Late Medieval ­England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 6, 19, 68–70, 131–32, 137. 30. ​ Paradisus anime intelligentis, part 1, no. 12, pp. 30–33; Hoenen, “Tradition and Renewal,” 401.

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If our diverse sources with substantial agreement accentuate the divinity of Christ’s person and nature, how does that finding bear on the relationship between ordinary and exceptional piety? In two ways. First, it shows how emphasis on Christ’s divinity was shared by the ordinary readers of popu­lar devotional texts, ordinary Christians receiving “God’s body” in the sacrament or visiting “houses of God” in their towns, and the more exceptional individuals who heard Christ’s voice and saw his face. It was part of a broadly shared culture. Second, the divinity of Christ is what made him universally accessible. His historical humanity had given him presence at a par­tic­u­lar time and place; his eternal divinity allowed him to enter into time and be pre­sent to an ordinary person in prayer as well as to a visionary in rapture. The ­human nature assumed by the divine person served as a lure for affection, but it was the divine person who made the ­human nature accessible in the first place.

C h a p te r   2

Narrating the Presence of the God-­Man

Mieczyslaw Malinski’s Witnesses to Jesus, while fictionalizing the life of Christ, focuses not on Christ himself but on five individuals from his following or his environment. Christ is seen through the eyes or from the perspective of t­ hose five characters. Kahlil Gibran’s Jesus the Son of Man uses fundamentally the same strategy, with shorter vignettes focused now on an apostle, now on a Greek apothecary, intermittently on Mary Magdalene, never squarely on Christ himself. ­There are novels such as Nikos Kazantzakis’s Last Temptation of Christ that do center on him more directly, but to the extent that a writer works within a traditional and orthodox Christology, presenting the main character poses a difficult challenge. How does one give plausible depiction to a character with divine and h ­ uman natures both manifested in an eternally divine person? Where would one begin?1 Late medieval lit­er­a­ture of revelation is not meant as fiction, and it involves Christ’s entry into the lives of ­others more often than an imaginative recreation of his own life. Still, it ­faces the same prob­lem of showing in narrative what it can mean for Christ to have a divine person with two natures. A hagiographer narrating a single scene has an easier task; Sulpicius Severus gives 1. ​Mieczyslaw Malinski, Witnesses to Jesus: The Stories of Five Who Knew Him, trans. Lucy Mazareski (New York: Crossroad, 1982); Kahlil Gibran, Jesus the Son of Man: His Words and His Deeds as Told and Recorded by T ­ hose Who Knew Him (1928; London: Heinemann, 1954); Nikos Kazantzakis, The Last Temptation of Christ, trans. P.A. Bien (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1960). 35

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a classic apparition scene in his life of Saint Martin of Tours without needing to explore the relationship of Christ’s person and natures. When Christ becomes more of a constant companion, however, and Christophany becomes more routinized, the reader is more likely to expect a coherent account of who and what he represents. Four narrative strategies can be seen as ways of meeting this challenge. The first is use of magisterial discourse: Christ reveals himself and speaks, often at length, appearing to be a conversation partner like any fellow ­human. Depicted in this role in art, he may point with his right index fin­ger to the fin­gers of his left hand to indicate, like a teacher, the divisions of his lecture (figure 1, page vi in this volume).2 His engagement with interlocutors and his likeness to any other magisterial speaker are clearest when the discourse takes the form of a dialogue, which often means a series of questions and answers, sometimes extended. While thus resembling a ­human speaker, however, he teaches as one with divine authority, not as the priests and professors. His articulation may mark him as ­human, but his level of authority marks him as divine. Even when he appears as a child, he may engage in magisterial discourse; that might be expected when he is manifested at the age of twelve, the age at which Jesus instructed the masters in the ­Temple (Luke 2:41–52), but even in infancy he may teach with divine authority. Magisterial discourse implies Christ’s ­human interaction, divine authority, and personal agency, but the implicit becomes explicit when the discourse turns to autotheology: when Christ speaks of his divinity and humanity. T ­ here is no need then for him to speak also of the person in whom the natures inhere, ­because already in his role as speaker he manifests the person speaking of ­those natures. He reveals himself and speaks of “my divinity” and “my humanity,” and the speaking Christ is the single person who claims both a ­human and a divine nature. He need not always speak of both natures together; at times he may assert his divine omnipotence, and elsewhere he may refer to his incarnation or Passion. In any event, the distinction between subject and predicate already implies a distinction between the person and the nature or natures of which he speaks. This is the simplest and most straightforward way of articulating the complexities of traditional Christology, and it occurs often. The second strategy is the assertion of transtemporality: the Christ who appears in time, at some moment in a late medieval environment, is presented

2. ​See, for example, the image from Hoff kijn van devotien (Antwerp: Gerhard Leeu, 1487), reproduced in Anne Winston-­Allen, Stories of the Rose: The Making of the Rosary in the ­Middle Ages (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), 106, fig. 29. On the gesture in university teaching see Cornelius O’Boyle, “Gesturing in the Early Universities,” Dynamis 20 (2000): 277.

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explic­itly or implicitly as having entered into time from eternity.3 When he does so, it is usually clear that this is the same person who has entered into time at the much e­ arlier juncture of his incarnation. He often bears the form and marks of his historical past, coming as a child or as the Man of Sorrows, appearing to be projected from the past into the pre­sent, which would be the opposite of visionary retrojection, or movement back in time to the events of Christ’s historical life. His bearing such forms and marks recalls his assumption of h ­ uman nature and the experience that entailed, but it is his divinity that makes him ubiquitously pre­sent and accessible. Third is the depiction of divinized humanity: the repre­sen­ta­tion of Christ who even in his h ­ uman, physical form becomes manifestly divine. The biblical pre­ce­dent for this is the Transfiguration, at which the face of Christ shone like the sun and his garments became glistening white (Matthew 17:1–8, Mark 9:2–8, Like 9:28–36). In late medieval Christophany as well, his body sometimes appears luminous. That he has a body in the first place manifests his assumed humanity; that it becomes radiant signals that he is a super­natural presence, a divine light that has entered the world in late medieval revelations, as in the historical incarnation. Fourth is the fusion of mystical and devotional language. A person experiencing Christ’s presence may begin by meditating on moments from his incarnate life and may then become rapt in mystical ­union with him, and his two natures are reflected in the two modes of engagement with him. Meditation turns into contemplation, and attention shifts from the God-­man to the God. But the modes are sometimes juxtaposed or blended and not clearly sequential. All four of ­these narrative strategies, ­these ways of talking about the person and natures of Christ, are found with greater or lesser frequency in the texts we survey in this chapter. What­ever we assume about the revelatory experiences themselves—­whether we take them to be entirely exceptional or somehow in continuity with more ordinary devotion, w ­ hether we see them as purely fictional or as based on some sort of a­ ctual experience—­the ways they are narrated tend to accentuate their exceptional character. A pious person in prayer might be at least implicitly conscious of the traditional theology of Christ, but it is in the narration of more overtly revelatory experience that this theology is 3. ​Eleonore Stump and Norman Kretzmann, in their article “Eternity,” Journal of Philosophy 78 (1981): 429–58, explore the philosophical implications of Boethius’s influential stance on eternity, which helped mold Platonic notions as they ­were taken over in medieval philosophy. The position Kretzmann and Stump articulate, that Christ’s divine nature cannot enter into time (p. 453), is clearly not one shared by the late medieval subjects we are studying. For a critique of Stump and Kretzmann, see Harm Goris, “Interpreting Eternity in Thomas Aquinas,” in Time and Eternity: The Medieval Discourse, ed. Gerhard Jaritz and Gerson Moreno-­Riaño (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003), 193–202.

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explic­itly stated or manifested in the four ways sketched above. The more fully and explic­itly the subjects or their biographers delineate the character of Christ, the more singular the subjects themselves appear as witnesses to that character. In ­later chapters we w ­ ill come back to explore how, alongside t­hese narrative strategies that point to exceptional experience, ­there are passage that complicate m ­ atters by suggesting that the exceptional is somehow grounded in and even blended with ordinary piety. This chapter considers a series of key texts in roughly chronological order, which, broadly speaking, evince an increasing emphasis on Christ’s divinity. Thirteenth-­century texts that told how the God-­man interacted regularly with ­people make clear the difficulties of describing that interaction. Lit­er­a­ture from the nunnery of Helfta at the end of the thirteenth c­ entury comes closer to showing how the pieces fit together and the two natures are linked to a single person. Then, in some texts of the ­fourteenth ­century, the natures become in some mea­sure fused, and the h ­ uman nature of Christ at least appears to be subsumed in an overpowering divinity.4

Four Thirteenth-­Century Figures Four writers of the thirteenth ­century—­Mechthild of Magdeburg, Angela of Foligno, Margaret of Cortona, and Hadewijch of Brabant—­set the stage for what comes ­later. It is sometimes unclear in their writings ­whether they are referring to Christ or to God the ­Father, and the narrative strategies that are used ­later to convey what it means for Christ to have two natures in one person are not fully developed in their work. Even when they remain uncertain or unclear, however, they show how writers in this period ­were striving to address ­these issues. Mechthild of Magdeburg (ca. 1210–ca. 1285) was a beguine who late in her life, around 1272, entered the monastery of Helfta and ­there, with the help of 4. ​Apart from the works cited below on par­tic­u­lar writers, see ­these broader studies and collections: Bernard McGinn, The Flowering of Mysticism: Men and ­Women in the New Mysticism, 1200–1350 (New York: Crossroad, 1998), and The Va­ri­et­ ies of Vernacular Mysticism, 1350–1550 (New York: Crossroad, 2012); Rosalynn Voaden, ed., Prophets Abroad: The Reception of Continental Holy W ­ omen in Late-­ Medieval ­England (Cambridge: Brewer, 1996); Diane Watt, ed., Medieval ­Women in Their Communities (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1997); Rosalynn Voaden, God’s Words, ­Women’s Voices: The Discernment of Spirits in the Writing of Late-­Medieval ­Women Visionaries (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 1999); Diana Wood, ed., ­Women and Religion in Medieval ­England (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2003); Alastair Minnis and Rosalynn Voaden, eds., Medieval Holy ­Women in the Christian Tradition, c. 1100–­c. 1500 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010); Nancy Bradley Warren, The Embodied Word: Female Spiritualities, Contested Orthodoxies, and En­glish Religious Cultures, 1350–1700 (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010); and Jessica Barr, Intimate Reading: Textual Encounters in Medieval ­Women’s Visions and Vitae (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2020).

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nuns from the community, completed The Flowing Light of Divinity.5 This book, which rec­ords the revelations given to Mechthild, was soon translated from her ­Middle Low German into Latin and ­Middle High German and had significant if not widespread influence.6 Mechthild often uses the title “Lord” for Christ, but when she speaks of “God,” she is less consistent. She frequently mentions God’s incarnation, his ­mother, his five wounds,7 but ­there are passages in which “God” has an only begotten Son,8 and ­here the reference is obviously to the F ­ ather. When she speaks of God as “the sublime pope of ­ ather. The persons of the Trinity heaven,”9 again she prob­ably means the F hold dialogue among themselves in her work.10 She ponders where God was before creation, and she answers that he was in himself, like a sphere whose ­ ere pre­sent and manicircumference is an unmea­sur­able circle;11 all t­ hings w fest to him already, like Neoplatonic archetypes in the divine mind, but with creation they became manifest in themselves.12 ­Here she seems to have in mind the undifferentiated deity. But she can be perplexingly inconsistent: in one long prayer “God” is explic­itly the F ­ ather, but t­ oward the end she refers to the eucharistic “viaticum of your holy body,” referring to Christ, while the prayer concludes with the standard formula, “Through our Lord Jesus Christ your Son,” which assumes the prayer has been addressed to the F ­ ather all along.13 When Mechthild uses “God” for Christ, her purpose is often to discuss not his divinity in itself but the relationship of divinity and humanity. “God” 5. ​The lit­er­a­ture on Mechthild of Magdeburg is rich, but see Bernard McGinn, Meister Eckhart and the Beguine Mystics: Hadewijch of Brabant, Mechthild of Magdeburg and Marguerite Porete (New York: Continuum, 1994); Frank J. Tobin, Mechthild von Magdeburg: A Medieval Mystic in Modern Eyes (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1995); Sara S. Poor,” Cloaking the Body in Text: The Question of Female Authorship in the Writings of Mechthild von Magdeburg,” Exemplaria: A Journal of Theory in Medieval and Re­nais­sance Studies 12 (2000): 417–53; Amy Hollywood, The Soul as Virgin Wife: Mechthild of Magdeburg, Marguerite Porete, and Meister Eckhart (Notre Dame, IN.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001); and Sara  S. Poor, Mechthild of Magdeburg and Her Book: Gender and the Making of Textual Authority (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). 6. ​Apart from the lit­er­a­ture cited above, see Leonard Patrick Hindsley, The Mystics of Engelthal: Writings from a Medieval Monastery (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 1998), 137–43, for Mechthild’s influence on a convent impor­tant for this study. 7. ​FLG 1.19, pp. 36–37 (Tobin, 48); 1.41, pp. 56–57 (Tobin, 57); 2.26, pp.136–41 (Tobin, 96–97). Cf. 2.4, pp. 88–91 (Tobin, 75); 2.19, pp. 106–7 (Tobin, 83); 3.2, pp. 160–63 (Tobin, 108); 3.9, pp. 174–81 (Tobin, 116); 5.17, pp. 352–53 (Tobin, 193). 8. ​FLG 1.25, pp. 46–47 (Tobin, 52); 7.9, pp. 550–53 (Tobin, 283). 9. ​FLG 6.2, pp. 432–35 (Tobin, 228). 10. ​FLG 3.9, pp. 174–81 (Tobin, 114–19). 11. ​See Alan of Lille, “Sermon on the Intelligible Sphere,” in Alan of Lille, Literary Works, ed. and trans. Winthrop Wetherbee (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 1–5. 12. ​FLG 6.31, pp. 492–95 (Tobin, 257). 13. ​FLG 5.35, pp. 408–13 (Tobin, 217–19).

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showed her the wounds in his heart and said, “See how they have hurt me.” The heart wound came when the soldier thrust his lance into Christ’s side ­after his death (John 19:34). She asked why that was necessary; surely the world should have been redeemed by what he had suffered previously. No, he said, “that did not satisfy my F ­ ather.” His divinity was pre­sent in all his bodily members even when he was dead, while a “spiritual image” of his humanity existed eternally in his divinity, again like a Neoplatonic archetype in the divine mind.14 Precisely the u ­ nion of divinity and humanity remains paramount for her. She makes a long plea to “dear Jesus, God of heaven,” complaining to him about religious who resist the “divine inwardness” that is available to them, to which Christ responds with a discourse on how his humanity did so much work on earth that had been prepared by his divinity.15 He speaks of his sufferings. At one point Christ the bridegroom speaks to his bride, calling attention to his own comeliness and promising that she w ­ ill be martyred like him, imitating his Passion step by step, including crucifixion by the virtues.16 Even ­here he is not simply the Man of Sorrows but the God-­man who lived in timeless eternity, then lived in bounded time, and lives now in unbounded time, capable of manifesting himself at any point and referring back to the historical events that are now archetypal. He remains in transtemporal eternity. She does not say explic­itly that it is Christ’s “person” that links the two natures and acts by virtue of both, but that would be the traditional way of accounting for the configuration of identity and action that she speaks of in more fluid and poetic terms. Mechthild sometimes speaks of divinity, humanity, and Holy Spirit, and if this is to be understood as strictly a Trinitarian formula, then divinity is associated chiefly with the F ­ ather and humanity with the Son. In some contexts this is clearly not what Mechthild means, b­ ecause the context makes clear that it is Christ who is speaking, and he is referring to his divinity, his humanity, and the Holy Spirit whom he sends.17 In book 6, for example, “God” delivers ­these lines: My divinity burned you; My humanity recognized you; My Holy Spirit sanctified you in your poverty.18 14. ​FLG 6.24, pp. 482–83 (Tobin, 251–52). 15. ​FLG 6.13, pp.  456–57 (Tobin, 238–40): “Eya lieber Jhesal, got von himelriche . . . ​vor der goetlichen innekeit.” 16. ​FLG 1.29, pp. 48–51 (Tobin, 54). 17. ​In FLG 2.26, pp.  136–41 (Tobin, 96–98), Christ refers twice to “my Holy Spirit”; cf. 1.43, pp. 56–57 (Tobin, 58). 18. ​FLG 6.25, pp. 482–83 (Tobin, 252) (“divinity” is substituted for “Godhead” ­here and in other passages, to avoid any suggestion that “Godhead” is something other than divinity); cf. 1.41, pp. 56–57 (Tobin, 57).

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But the God who speaks h ­ ere has been spoken of in the preceding chapter as shedding his blood for h ­ uman redemption, as needing to satisfy his F ­ ather, as having his divinity pre­sent throughout his body even in death. He makes clear, “And a spiritual image of my humanity has always existed without a beginning suspended in my eternal divinity,” which gives his humanity an archetypal real­ity prior to the incarnation. Elsewhere he speaks of the heat of his divinity, the longing of his humanity, and the plea­sure of his Holy Spirit, and again it is Christ who speaks.19 And when a person receives “God’s body” in communion, receiving Christ in his divinity and humanity, the divinity “unites itself to our innocent soul” while “God’s humanity mixes itself with our hideous body,” and the Holy Spirit makes a dwelling “in our faith.”20 In all ­these cases the triad ending with the Holy Spirit gives the impression of being fully Trinitarian, with Christ associated with the humanity, but that cannot be the meaning; the divinity and the humanity are both Christ’s, and the language is that of autotheology.21 Yet ­there are passages in which similar language does clearly apply to the Trinity, with humanity ascribed to the Son. Most relevant h ­ ere is a passage from book 5 referring to the incarnation. Mechthild says ­here that “the ­whole Holy Trinity, with the power of the divinity, the good w ­ ill of its humanity, and the noble delicacy of the Holy Spirit” passed through Mary’s body and into her soul, and shortly afterward she uses a similar formula: “The almighty God with his wisdom, the eternal Son with his h ­ uman truth, the Holy Spirit with his delicate sweetness” passed into Mary’s body.22 In ­these passages Mechthild surely does not mean to deny the divinity of Christ, but precisely in the context in which he is assuming humanity, he is marked by it in contrast to the F ­ ather’s divinity. Apart from this context, she frequently represents the divine person of Christ as speaking of both his natures. She poses a question to “dear Jesus, God of heaven,” and he responds: “My divinity came to earth; My humanity did the work. My divinity went on the cross; My humanity suffered death. My divinity arose from death And led humanity to heaven.”23 19. ​FLG 4.12, pp. 264–65 (Tobin, 155). 20. ​FLG 4.8, pp. 254–55 (Tobin, 150–51). 21. ​See also FLG 6.16, pp. 470–73 (Tobin, 246). 22. ​FLG 5.23, pp. 364–65 (Tobin, 199, slightly altered). 23. ​FLG 6.13, pp. 456–69 (Tobin, 238–39).

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But in this poetic formulation the divinity and humanity of Christ recur in alternation that leads to a final pairing in which the humanity in question is not specifically Christ’s but rather humankind. In short, ­there is considerable fluidity of language and of meaning in Mechthild’s Flowing Light. She clearly seeks to assert the connectedness of Christ’s divinity and humanity, and that ­these natures are joined in a single person is surely implied throughout, but her purpose is not to give tidily coherent statements on t­ hese points of doctrine. Angela of Foligno (1248–1309), a penitent and an affiliate of the Franciscan order, dictated her autobiographical Memorial and a set of Instructions to an unknown “­Brother A.”24 She often speaks of “God” when she means more specifically “Christ,” but the specificity is not always obvious, nor is its importance always clear. She speaks as though she is referring to the undifferentiated deity, but as she continues, it often becomes clear that she is referring to Christ. At one point she has questions that she “hoped God would resolve,” and so she asks him why he had created man, then allowed humankind to sin; that she is addressing Christ becomes clear only from the following question, “And why did you allow so much suffering to be inflicted upon you for our sins?”25 He assures her that “the ­whole world is full of me,” and she notes that “­every creature was indeed full of his presence”;26 in the sequel, he tells her of his life on earth with his disciples. She beholds God as “a fullness, a brightness with which I felt myself so filled that words fail me”; this God is without bodily form, but then she goes on to speak of his ­mother and the saints.27 In the final chapter of the Memorial he assures her that “the entire Trinity” rests in her, which might suggest that the God speaking to her is not simply one of the divine persons, but the speaker then tells her he holds her as she holds him, and the very next sentence goes on to compare this relationship with the entry of God, meaning Christ, into the sacrament of the altar.28 At one early point in her Memorial, Angela shows uncertainty. She says the divine person communicating with her on one occasion identified himself as the Holy Spirit but then as the crucified. Her amanuensis catches the discrep24. ​Paul Lachance, Angela of Foligno: Passionate Mystic of the Double Abyss (Hyde Park, NY: New City, 2006). Apart from the edition and translation (given in the list of abbreviations, u ­ nder “AF”), see Enrico Menestò and Attilio Bartoli Langeli, eds., Il “Liber” della beata Angela da Foligno: Edizione in facsimile e trascrizione del ms. 342 della Biblioteca comunale di Assisi, con quattro studi (Spoleto: Fondazione Centro italiano di studi sull’alto Medioevo, 2009). 25. ​AF Memoriale, c. 6, p. 280 (Lachance, 177). 26. ​AF Memoriale, c. 4, p. 204 (Lachance, 149): “Verum est quod totus mundus est plenus de me” and “tunc videbam quod omnis creatura erat plena ipso.” 27. ​AF Memoriale, c. 4, p. 210 (Lachance, 151–52). 28. ​AF Memoriale, c. 9, p. 390 (Lachance, 215).

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ancy that she herself has missed and calls it to her attention. She responds that the entire Trinity now dwells within her.29 If Angela usually has Christ in mind but refers to him as God, does this mean that she is more alert to his divinity than to his humanity? ­Matters are not so s­ imple. T ­ here are passages referring specifically to the Passion, and t­ hese pose in­ter­est­ing theological challenges, as we s­ hall see. Apart from t­ hese, her stance in her Memorial is not dif­fer­ent in princi­ple from that in her Instructions, where she refers to Christ incessantly as the “God-­man” (Deus homo). She conveys no sense of a sharp distinction between the divinity and the humanity of Christ but often speaks as if he ­were marked more than anything by a kind of divinized humanity. At one point she speaks of Christ’s humanity as like a cloak for his divinity. She has a vision of the Virgin, and then suddenly she beholds Christ “in his glorified humanity.”30 Even when she is referring to Christ’s body, it reveals his divinity to her: the beauty of his throat could only emanate from his divinity, and it persuades her she is standing in God’s presence.31 As the account proceeds, she is increasingly drawn to the divinity: in chapter 9 she says she is “enwrapped” in his divinity and less absorbed than previously in his life and humanity.32 Even in that concluding chapter she distinguishes most emphatically between an apophatic experience of the divine darkness and a cataphatic perception of Christ as the God-­man, possessed of humanity inextricably linked with divinity: When I am in that darkness I do not remember anything about anything ­human, or the God-­man, or anything which has a form. Nevertheless, I see all and I see nothing. As what I have spoken of withdraws and stays with me, I see the God-­man. He draws my soul with ­g reat gentleness and he sometimes says to me: “You are I and I am you.” I see, then, ­those eyes and that face so gracious and attractive as he leans to embrace me. In short, what proceeds from ­those eyes and that face is what I said that I saw in that previous darkness which comes from within, and which delights me so that I can say nothing about it. When I am in the God-­man my soul is alive. And I am in the God-­man much more than in the other vision of seeing God with darkness. The soul is alive in that vision concerning the God-­man. The vision with darkness, however, draws me so much more that ­there is no comparison. On the 29. ​AF Memoriale, c. 3, pp. 192–94 (Lachance, 144–45). 30. ​AF Memoriale, c. 7, p. 304 (Lachance, 184–85). 31. ​AF Memoriale, c. 3, p. 194 (Lachance, 146). 32. ​AF Memoriale, c. 9, p. 374 (“involvit se in divinitate eius”) (Lachance, 209); c. 9, p. 380 (Lachance, 211–12).

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other hand, I am in the God-­man almost continually. It began in this continual fashion on a certain occasion when I was given the assurance that t­here was no intermediary between God and myself. Since that time t­ here has not been a day or a night in which I did not continually experience this joy of the humanity [of Christ].33 Even in distinguishing the apophatic and the cataphatic experience, Angela says that what emanates from the alluring eyes of the God-­man is the same as what she perceives in the ineffable darkness. She seems to mean something akin to Bernard of Clairvaux’s notion that one is drawn by carnal love for the humanity of Christ and then led to rational and spiritual love, turning from the immediate attraction of his humanity to the divinity that makes the humanity attractive and is in itself supremely lovable,34 except that what she sees in her devotion and what she sees in her contemplation become conflated, and ­there is no sense of sequencing from the one to the other. In the vita of Margaret of Cortona (1247–1297), also a penitent and an affiliate of the Franciscans, Christ’s divinity is clearly paramount.35 To be sure, she recognizes that he has both natures, and when the host is consecrated one day at mass, she has a vision in which the priest is holding up a child who is whiter than snow, and his white body represents his humanity, but he is clothed in a gold garment that represents the divinity that assumes the humanity.36 She thus inverts the expected relationship, in which the divinity takes on the humanity as a garment. In the vita as a w ­ hole, however, the divinity features far more prominently. Christ identifies himself as God.37 She identifies Christ as God.38 He is the creator, the omniscient one, the eternal judge, “eternal providence,” and when she begs to behold his face, he recalls God’s admonition to Moses in Exodus (33:20), saying she cannot see his face in all its glory 33. ​AF Memoriale, c. 9, p. 362 (Lachance, 205). Key phrases in the Latin are “de aliqua humanitate vel de Deo homine nec de aliqua re quae formam habeat”; “Tu es ego et ego sum tu; in isto Deo homine stando anima est viva”; “in isto de Deo homine sto quasi multum continue; nihil erat medium inter me et ipsum”; and “in qua non continue habuerim istam laetitiam de humanitate.” 34. ​Bernard of Clairvaux, The Works of Bernard of Clairvaux, vol. 2 (Song of Songs, 1), trans. Kilian Walsh (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1971), sermon 20, 1:147–55. 35. ​Mary Harvey Doyno, “ ‘A Par­tic­u­lar Light of Understanding’: Margaret of Cortona, the Franciscans, and a Cortonese Cleric,” in History in the Comic Mode: Medieval Communities and the ­Matter of Person, ed. Rachel Fulton Brown and Bruce  W. Holsinger (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 68–78; Mary Harvey Doyno, The Lay Saint: Charity and Charismatic Authority in Medieval Italy, 1150–1350 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019), pp. 197–241. 36. ​VMC 7.17, p. 330 (Renna, 187–88). 37. ​E.g., VMC 5.16, p. 262 (Renna 125); 5.21, p. 267 (Renna, 130); 5.46, p. 285 (Renna, 147); 7.15, p. 328 (Renna, 185); 7.22, p. 334 (Renna, 192); 9.72, p. 425 (Renna, 277) (­here the wording is “uero Deo et homine,” but then simply “michi Deo”). 38. ​E.g., VMC 7.22, p. 334 (Renna, 192).

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in this life.39 He is a humbled God, but then Margaret sees him enthroned.40 Routinely he is “the Most High,” or “God most high.”41 In the Psalms that title is often used for God, and in Luke’s gospel it refers to the F ­ ather, and Christ is “Son of the Most High,”42 but in Margaret’s vita it is Christ himself who claims the title. He asks Margaret if she believes he is true God, equal to the ­Father, and she says, “Not only do I believe, but I am amazed that my soul does not melt in your presence.”43 One passage in par­tic­ul­ar bears close examination. Margaret’s confessor and hagiographer begins by describing Christ’s ambiguous presence and concealment, then proceeds to a complicated and revealing discussion of the way she addresses Christ, then returns to the theme of real but hidden presence. The central portion of the exchange is this: The fire of love in her soul was so intense that, publicly and privately, she expressed a g­ reat divine sweetness. She said: “Lord, Lord, where are you?” Her confessor, ever jealous for her salvation, advised her to say: “Lord F ­ ather, Son, and Holy Spirit,” or simply “Lord Jesus Christ!” Margaret answered: “I call upon the one and eternal God, who is F ­ ather, Son, and Holy Spirit.” But a­ fter she said t­ hese words she felt afraid, and so the Lord comforted her: “Do not worry, my d­ aughter, I am pleased with the way you pray, since your devout intention tends to increase my lordship. And so, just as my vicar, in whom I have placed the fullness of power, is not called ‘pope’ but ‘holy f­ather’ when referring to his greater state of perfection, your manner of saying my name is more dignified.”44 The passage as a w ­ hole makes clear that she prays specifically to Christ, but she addresses him as her divine “Lord.” That title is ambiguous: it can refer to an undifferentiated deity, to the Trinity, to God the F ­ ather, or to Christ. Her confessor recommends a straightforward mode of invocation. She says she addresses the single and eternal triune God, but then she questions her own usage, perhaps now sensitized to the incongruity: she is referring to the Trinity but realizes she is communicating specifically with Christ. She inquires of Christ himself 39. ​VMC 4.16, p. 233 (Renna, 98); 6.28, p. 317 (Renna, 174); 5.9, p. 249 (Renna, 113); 5.22, p. 268 (Renna, 131); 2.2a, p. 197 (Renna, 62). The request to see Christ’s face is in VMC 6.18, p. 306 (Renna, 164). 40. ​VMC 4.12, p. 226 (Renna 91); 6.11, p. 295 (Renna 155); 6.18, p. 307 (Renna 165). 41. ​E.g., VMC 2.11d, p. 207 (Renna, 73); 5.4, p. 245 (Renna, 109); 5.15, p. 260 (Renna, 123); 5.22, p. 268 (Renna, 131); 9.2 (Renna, 208). 42. ​Luke 1:32, 1:35, 8:28. 43. ​VMC 7.5, p.  322 (Renna, 180). Renna follows closely the edition by Iozzelli, which is now preferred to e­ arlier editions. 44. ​VMC 7.6, p.  323 (Renna, 180–81). H ­ ere again the critical edition differs significantly from ­earlier editions.

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­ hether her manner of speaking pleases him, and he assures her that it does inw deed please him to be identified with the triune deity, b­ ecause that usage conveys a strong sense of his divine power. And yet she and he both understand that when she speaks as she does she is referring specifically to Christ. In the face of uncertainty, then, she defends her identification of Christ as Lord or God, which bestows on him an honor that he finds apt. Her argument is not strictly theological (she does not explain the sense in which the person of Christ is divine) but rather rhetorical (Christ says the more dignified title of divinity pleases him), and yet it has theological implications (she gives expression to that priority of Christ’s divinity which is integral to the notion of incarnation and accounts for Christ’s transtemporal accessibility). In ­these three early cases, then, t­ here are complicating f­ actors: Mechthild of Magdeburg and Angela of Foligno speak of “God” in more than one way, and they strug­gle to express the relationship between Christ’s divinity and his humanity, while Margaret of Cortona, quite emphatic in stressing Christ’s divinity, is made to recognize that her usage can seem problematic. Even given ­these complications, we see in t­hese three cases a strong tendency t­oward articulation of Christ as a divine person, and this tendency continues in l­ater writings. The thirteenth-­century Flemish writer Hadewijch (fl. ca. 1240s) deserves some mention ­here ­because she addresses the questions at hand in an in­ter­est­ing way, although she lived ­earlier than ­others ­here discussed, and she did ­little to situate her work in the context of everyday life.45 Like Mechthild of Magdeburg she was a beguine, and like Mechthild she seems to have left her community of beguines ­under challenging circumstances, but so far as we know, she did not turn to a monastic community that had the courage and resources to support her. Two of the visions she rec­ords are particularly relevant for their discussion of Christ’s divinity and humanity. In each of them t­here is monologue on the part of Christ, not dialogue; we have ­here the most fully developed autotheology we have encountered so far, in a form of magisterial discourse. Vision 1 occurred on a Sunday in the octave of Pentecost, when she received communion.46 At one point in this extended vision Christ tells Hadewijch that if she wishes to resemble him in his humanity, as she desires to enjoy him in his divinity,47 she must resolve to be poor, wretched, and despised by all, 45. ​Hadewijch, The Complete Works, trans. ­Mother Columba Hart, preface by Paul Mommaers (New York: Paulist, 1980). See P. Mommaers and E. Dutton, Hadewijch: Writer—­Beguine—­Love Mystic (Leuven: Peeters, 2004). 46. ​Hadewijch, Complete Works, 267–71; Hadewijch, Das Buch der Visionen, ed. and trans. Gerald Hofmann (Stuttgart-­Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-­Holzboog, 1998),1: 44–67 (commentary in 2:9–65). 47. ​The phrasing “in my Divinity and Humanity,” as given in the En­glish translation, appears not to be supported by the manuscripts.

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finding delight and not sadness in afflictions. She might emulate his humanity, but to understand that humanity, she must know that it entailed a willed restraint from the prerogatives of divinity. True, he possessed super­natural gifts and ­union with his F ­ ather, but “never for a single instant did I call upon my power to give myself relief when I was in need, and never did I seek to profit from the gifts of my Spirit. . . . ​Never did I dispel my griefs or my pain with the aid of my omnipotence.” Again, “I never cheered myself by my inner power, except with the consolation that I was certain of my ­Father.” In this context the eternally divine person is speaking to Hadewijch and referring to the two natures that he possesses. ­There is a parallel between what he experienced and what he demands of her, but not an exact parallel. He already possessed the powers of divinity that in princi­ple could have averted his suffering; his divinity is prior to his humanity, and experiencing the consequences of incarnation fully means submitting voluntarily to a diminution of power. She seeks to share the joy of his divinity, which she can do only by not rising prematurely above her humanity and the affliction to which she is subject. Hadewijch experienced Vision 7 at matins on Pentecost, when she desired “to have full fruition of my Beloved, and to understand and taste him to the full.” She further wished “that his Humanity should to the fullest extent be one in fruition with my humanity. . . . ​I wished he might content me interiorly with his divinity”;48 in this way, she anticipates the sacramental reception of Christ’s divinity and humanity. As she goes on, however, Hadewijch beholds Christ in the form of a child, as he appeared in his early youth, with a ciborium containing his body in his right hand and a chalice in his left hand. But then he takes the form of a grown man, as at the Last Supper, “looking like a ­Human Being and a Man, wonderful, and beautiful, and with glorious face,” and in that form he gives himself in the sacrament and then presses her to himself in a tight embrace. But then she loses his “manly beauty,” he fades and dissolves, so that “I could no longer recognize or perceive him outside me, and I could no longer distinguish him within me.” At that point “it was to me as if we ­were one without difference.” The divine person is able to take on the form of the humanity that he has in fact assumed, but a­ fter she has received the fullness of Christ in communion, that form passes away, and “the Beloved” remains with her in wholly indistinguishable form as the deity with whom she is now united.

48. ​Hadewijch, Complete Works, 280–82; Hadewijch, Das Buch der Visionen, 1: 92–97 (commentary in 2: 111–21). The published En­glish translation reads “Godhead” rather than “divinity.” On this vision, see Bernard McGinn, “Visions and Visualizations in the ­Here and Hereafter,” Harvard Theological Review 98 (2005): 238–39.

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It would be pos­si­ble to read both ­these visions as entailing an ele­ment of docetism: Christ during his earthly life possesses at all times the full power of divinity but refrains from using it, and thus seems to be ­human; Christ in the sacrament has the “form” of a child and then a grown man, but the form dissolves, and what is left is pure divinity. The more orthodox and more plausible reading of both ­these texts is that the person who speaks is able to abstract from his natures and to refer to them both not as illusory forms but as natures, or as possessions that he can dispose of, holding the divinity at bay, allowing the humanity to melt away. The visions do not clearly privilege ­either the divinity over the humanity or vice versa. If anything they relativize the natures vis-­à-­vis the person who acts and speaks. Other figures could be cited as evidence for this thirteenth-­century tendency for devotion that includes focus on the humanity of Christ but is in one way or another made complex and sometimes even problematized in the sources. ­Earlier in the ­century Ida of Nivelles (ca. 1199–1231) had shown a tension between devotion to Christ’s humanity and absorption in his divinity: the former might be more accessible, but she inclined strongly ­toward the latter. Even when she experienced the humanity, t­ here was an almost insistent emphasis on finding the divinity ­behind the humanity. She saw Christ as a young boy with whom she exchanged kisses and embraces, and he said he was showing her his humanity. She asked to see him in his divinity, but he protested, “Do not ask such t­ hings of me, d­ aughter, since no mortal can, in this life, come to know what I am like in my divinity.” Yet shortly l­ ater he came to her, recalling that she wished “to learn as much as is allowable of the unspeakable knowledge of my divinity,” and to gratify this wish he gave her honey from his mouth that was his divinity, and at once she was aware of the Trinity. Two features of this incident are worth noting. First, the initial inability to experience Christ’s divinity is expressly represented as a limitation that goes against Ida’s inclination; experiencing only the humanity of Christ is a source of frustration. Second, even if the ­later taste of his divinity is expressed in purely symbolic terms, it is experienced in terms of encounter not with a symbol for divinity but with the divine real­ity in perceptible form.49 She recognized that Christ was God almighty but had emptied himself and taken the form of a servant (Philippians 2:7), and so she was captivated by his “sweet humanity” and delighted to recall his feet and hands, eyes and lips, side, face, heart, and other members. But even though her experience of his humanity involved “excessive tender49. ​Martinus Cowley, trans., Send Me God: The Lives of Ida the Compassionate of Nivelles, Nun lf La Ramée, Arnulf, Lay B ­ rother of Villers, and Abundus, Monk of Villers, by Goswin of Bossut (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003), c. 21d, p. 64; c. 22b, p. 65.

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ness and playful familiarity,” she sensed that this experience could suddenly shift and “absorb her into the lightsome abyss of his divinity.”50 The coinherence of the divine persons was revealed to her, and thus she exchanged not only with Christ but with the Trinity “the gentle whisperings of a bridegroom to his bride” and “the sweet friendliness of a bride to her groom,” taking the conventions of Christocentric bridal mysticism into a fully Trinitarian mystical encounter.51

Mechthild of Hackeborn and Gertrude of Helfta The writings produced at the monastery of Helfta in Saxony around the turn of the f­ourteenth ­century had profound impact on religious culture in and beyond Germany.52 The monastery was founded and patronized by regional aristocratic families, from whom many of the nuns came.53 It was the monastery to which Mechthild of Magdeburg moved around 1272; her presence and the report of her revelations clearly made an impact on the community, and echoes of her writing can be found in l­ater work.54 Early in its history Helfta became affiliated with but not formally incorporated into the Cistercian order. The confessors and spiritual directors ­were not exclusively from any one order, although Dominicans seem to have had a close connection with the ­house. Broadly speaking, the lit­er­a­ture that came out of Helfta at the end of the ­century embraced the divinity of Christ—­his divine nature as well as his divine person, even his heart conceived specifically as a divine heart—­more fully than the e­ arlier works we have discussed and with less hesitation than some 50. ​Cowley, Send Me God, c. 29b-5, p. 81. 51. ​Cowley, Send Me God, cc. 28–29, p. 77. 52. ​For Helfta generally, see Anna Harrison, “Thousands and Thousands of Lovers”: Sense of Community among the Nuns of Helfta (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press/Cistercian Publications, 2022). ­Earlier lit­er­a­ture includes Caroline Walker Bynum, “­Women Mystics in the Thirteenth C ­ entury: The Case for the Nuns of Helfta,” in Jesus as ­Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High M ­ iddle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 170–261; Mary Jeremy Finnegan, The ­Women of Helfta: Scholars and Mystics (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991); Maren Ankermann, “Spielarten erlebnismystischer Texts: Mechthild von Magdeburg: Das fließende Licht der Gottheit—­Gertrud die Große von Helfta: Legatus divinae pietatis,” in Europäische Mystik vom Hochmittelalter zum Barock: Eine Schlüsselepoche in der europäischen Mentalitäts-­, Spiritualitäts-­, und Individuationsentwicklung, ed. Wolfgang Beutin and Thomas Bütow (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1998), 119–38; and Anna,” ‘Oh! What Trea­sure Is in This Book?’: Writing, Reading, and Community at the Monastery of Helfta,” Viator, 39 (2008), 75–106. 53. ​Michael Bangert, “Die sozio-­kulturelle Situation des Klosters St. Maria in Helfta,” in “Vor dir steht die leere Schale meiner Sehnsucht”: Die Mystik der Frauen von Helfta, ed. Michael Bangert and Hildegund Keul, 2nd ed. (Leipzig: Benno, 1999), 35–39. 54. ​Barbara Newman, “Mechthild of Magdeburg at Helfta: A Study in Literary Influence,” in ­Women Intellectuals and Leaders in the M ­ iddle Ages, ed. Kathryn Kerby-­Fulton, Katie Ann-­Marie Bugys, and John Van Engen (Cambridge: Brewer, 2020), 383–95.

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of ­those e­ arlier works. This lit­er­a­ture also shows fully developed magisterial discourse (with clear articulation of autotheology) and distinctive fusion of mystical and devotional language. Mechthild of Hackeborn (ca. 1240–1298), d­ aughter of high Thuringian nobility, joined the community at Helfta in 1258 and became mistress of novices and chantress. Unlike the elder Mechthild of Magdeburg, she had a Latin education. Her revelations build in some ways on the work of the elder Mechthild but are more consistently focused on manifestation specifically of Christ.55 She told two confidantes about her own revelations, and they recorded them in The Book of Special Grace. The compilation was circulated and indeed quickly gained a wide readership. In comparison with the flamboyant exuberance of the elder Mechthild, she shows a calm serenity and a gift for the sublime.56 The Book of Special Grace is largely devoted to magisterial discourse, in the form of lengthy dialogues between the younger Mechthild and her divine interlocutor, who often speaks in terms of autotheology. Frequently the embedding narrative refers to him as “Lord,” while in the embedded dialogue she addresses him as “God,” and reference to his incarnation or Passion, or to his F ­ ather or his ­mother, makes clear that this means Christ. Thus, at one point the text reports, “She said to the Lord, ‘O my sweet God, how can anyone repay you for letting yourself be arrested and bound for man’s salvation?’ The Lord responded . . .”57 The terms “Lord” and “God” seem ­here interchangeable, but when Mechthild shifts to “God” as a term of address, even when speaking of Christ in the context of his Passion, the effect if not the intent is to emphasize that she is speaking to the divine person who has assumed h ­ uman nature. 55. ​For more detailed analy­sis on this point see, again, Newman, “Mechthild of Magdeburg at Helfta.” 56. ​The translation followed h ­ ere is Mechthild of Hackeborn and the Nuns of Helfta, The Book of Special Grace, intro. and trans. Barbara Newman (New York: Paulist, 2017), except for passages not included in this edition. On Mechthild of Hackeborn generally, see Margarete Hubrath, Schreiben und Erinnern: Zur “memoria” im Liber specialis gratiae Mechthilds von Hakeborn (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1996), and Margarete Hubrath, “The Liber specialis gratiae as a Collective Work of Several Nuns,” Jahrbuch der Oswals von Wolkenstein-­Gesellschaft 11 (1999): 233–44. 57. ​LSG 1.18, p. 51 (Newman, 69, slightly adapted); see also LSG 1.20, p. 74; 2.16, p. 150. For a parallel case, see Universitätsbibliothek Leipzig Ms 827, fol. 70v, which says of Gertrude, “uehementi succensa desiderio dixit ad dominum, ‘O fortissime deus, trahe me quantum uis arto uehiculo, ne proprio relicta arbitrio, tardem ad te peruenire.’ ” On this manuscript, see Almuth Märker and Balázs J. Nemes, “Hunc tercium conscripsi cum maximo labore occultandi: Schwester N von Helfta und ihre ›Sonderausgabe‹ des ›Legatus divinae pietatis‹ Gertruds von Helfta in der Leipziger Handschrift Ms 827,” Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur 137, no. 2 (2015): 248–96. What the manuscript gives is a se­lection of materials regarding Gertrude, a “special edition” of the Herald that overlaps with the se­lection in the “standard edition”; it is impor­tant b­ ecause it is very early and produced at a location close to Helfta.

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Mechthild’s dialogue with Christ focuses largely on question and response. When a liturgical text refers to the glory of the Lord’s voice, for example, Mechthild asks Christ what that voice is, and he gives her four answers: the voice of his glory is when a soul repents, when a soul is united with him in contemplation, when he calls a soul out of the body in death, and when he calls the elect at the Last Judgment.58 Christ is at times a kind of Zen master who delights in asking tough questions that Mechthild cannot answer, but the questions themselves are, like koans, part of the instruction. He asks what the face of her soul is, and when she remains ­silent, he tells her it is an image of the Trinity.59 She thinks herself unworthy even to enter his kitchen and wash his dishes, and he asks, “What is my kitchen and what are my dishes, which you would like to wash?” ­Here too she is ­silent, not knowing what to say. Christ says his kitchen is his heart, the cook is the Holy Spirit, and his dishes are the hearts of all the saints.60 If Christ speaks and Mechthild is at times without words, that is hardly surprising. One of Mechthild’s salient characteristics is won­der. She hears a liturgical text and won­ders at the meaning of some line, and Christ instructs her what it means. She sees a vision and won­ders at some aspect of it, and again Christ explains what she is seeing. She wishes to offer due praise to Christ or the Virgin or some saint, and the best form of praise is revealed to her. At times it might seem that what she is displaying is mere curiosity, perhaps even the inquisitiveness of a child who cannot cease asking questions. She asks what food Mary gave Jesus ­after weaning (a mixture of bread and wine), and what the w ­ aters are in Psalm 148:4 (the tears of the saints).61 But her curiosity is directed t­oward texts and visions that clearly strike her as alluring, captivating, awe-­inspiring, and when she wishes to know more, the satisfaction of that wish draws her more deeply into a state of wonderment. Often she does not state her question, and perhaps she both cannot and need not bring it to precise formulation, b­ ecause the wonderment evokes immediate response. Christ reads her mind. She hears something, she is drawn ­toward fuller apprehension, and Christ is t­ here at once, answering and enlightening. Won­der as inquiry and won­der as awe go hand in hand. In one exchange Christ pre­sents her with something rather like the challenges posed to a courtly lover, the demandes d’amour.62 She has heard words 58. ​LSG 1.3 (Newman, 41); see also 1.5 (Newman, 47); 1.11 (Newman, 59); 1.13 (Newman, 64); 1.16, pp. 67–68; 1.18, pp. 69–71; 1.19 (Newman, 81). 59. ​LSG 3.21, p. 224. 60. ​LSG 2.23, p. 165 (Newman, 131–32). 61. ​LSG 1.5, pp. 20–21 (Newman, 43–47); 2.18, p. 153. 62. ​On the demandes d’amour see Barbara Newman, From Virile ­Woman to WomanChrist: Studies in Medieval Religion and Lit­er­a­ture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), esp. 71–73; Barbara

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from John’s gospel (21:15–16) and entered into ecstasy. She sees herself before Christ. He urges her to respond truly and asks if t­ here is anything in the world she would be unwilling to forego on his account. She says if the entire world ­were hers, she would abandon it all for his love. He then asks if ­there is any ­labor so onerous that she would be unwilling to undertake for his love, and she says she would submit to anything. Fi­nally he asks if ­there is any suffering she would refuse for his love, and she declares herself willing to undergo all pain. He is satisfied by t­ hese answers, as if she has actually carried out in life all that she has promised hypothetically.63 Her ­will is tantamount to action, particularly ­because what they both cherish is the relationship within which action is embraced. Mechthild’s encounters with Christ at least sometimes take the form of mystical u ­ nion, and ­here we find a fusion of devotional and mystical language. To be sure, when the text speaks of mystical ­union, it is at times with the undifferentiated deity or even with the Trinity,64 but she also invokes traditional mystical themes in connection with the sacramental reception of Christ. When they receive communion, Christ gives each of the nuns a kiss by which they are made one with him in happy u ­ nion.65 When Mechthild herself receives communion, she converses with Christ and sees how he receives the heart of her soul and presses it to his own, making them a single mass, united in ­will and action.66 When the priest puts the host to the mouth of another nun, Mechthild sees Christ give himself wholly to her soul, his rosy mouth for kissing and his arms for embracing, and thus her soul is wholly united with the Beloved, so that nothing appears ­there but God.67 We might expect that ­union with Christ in the context of the Eucharist would be expressed in terms of Christ’s dwelling within the soul of the persons who have received him sacramentally, ­because it is Christ who is taken in physically and spiritually in the sacrament, but communion is also the occasion for reference to a kind of reciprocal indwelling, a classic Neoplatonic Newman, Medieval Crossover: Reading the Secular Against the Sacred (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013), 8, n28. 63. ​LSG 4.60, pp. 315–16. Roughly analogous is a ­battle of ­wills between Christ and Adelheid Langmann; see Hindsley, The Mystics of Engelthal, 174. 64. ​LSG 2.17, p. 152 (Newman, 129–30); LSG 2.26, p. 170 (Newman, 134–36); LSG 1.23, pp. 84–85 (Newman, 91–93); LSG 1.1, pp. 9–11 (Newman, 37–40). 65. ​LSG 4.17, pp. 274–75. On the link between mysticism and eucharistic piety more generally, see Volker Leppin, “Mystische Frömmigkeit und sakramentale Heilsvermittlung im späten Mittelalter,” Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte 112 (2001): 189–204. 66. ​LSG 3.27, pp. 230–31; see also LSG 3.50, p. 253, and cf. Psalm 81:6. 67. ​LSG 4.46, p. 302 (Newman, 185). For parallels in the sister-­books, see Gertrud Jaron Lewis, By ­Women, for W ­ omen, about ­Women: The Sister-­Books of Fourteenth-­Century Germany (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1996), 136, 140, 149.

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theme clearly expressed in theologians from Augustine to Eckhart: God (or Christ) is within the h ­ uman individual, who reciprocally is within God. When Mechthild has received communion, Christ shows her how he is now in her and she in him: she sees him like a clear crystal, and her soul like the purest ­water flowing all through his body.68 On another occasion, ­after communion Christ says to her, “I am in you and you in me, in my omnipotence like a fish in ­water,” which leads to a dialogue about how she w ­ ill function within the 69 one who is within her. The theme of Christ’s heart also leads to this concept of reciprocal indwelling, b­ ecause while Mechthild dwells within Christ’s heart, he also dwells in hers.70 He shows her a high and spacious ­house, representing the heart of God, within which is a smaller h ­ ouse of cedar and silver, signifying her soul, and he explains: “Your soul is always enclosed like this in my heart, and I am in the heart of your soul. You contain me in your innermost self; I am more intimate with you than any inwardness of your own. Yet my divine heart towers so high above your soul that it may seem unattainable. That is signified by the lofty height and breadth of this ­house.”71 This reciprocity manifests itself in another way: Christ, who obviously has power over Mechthild, speaks of himself as being in her power. He gives himself to her, “that what­ever you wish to do with me it may be entirely in your power.” She refuses to accept that offer and prefers his w ­ ill to her own. Echoing his words to the F ­ ather in Gethsemane (Luke 22:42), he says, “Not as I w ­ ill, but as you w ­ ill. Let it be in your power to choose.” Continuing the contest of deference, she replies, “I want nothing for my own benefit. I ask nothing. I wish nothing ­else than for you to be praised ­today—by yourself, in yourself, and through yourself—­for you could never be praised more sublimely or perfectly.”72 Elsewhere as well his offer evokes a counteroffer and reinforces her submission. He gives himself into the power of her soul, becoming her captive whom she can command as she wishes, and he is prepared to carry out all her ­will. She reflects what she might ask of him, and she realizes what 68. ​LSG 1.18, p. 53 (Newman, 69–76). 69. ​LSG 2.24, pp. 166–67 (Newman, 132–33); Harrison, “Thousands and Thousands of Lovers,” 181. 70. ​See Harrison, “Thousands and Thousands of Lovers,” 69; Jeffrey F. Hamburger, Nuns as Artists: The Visual Culture of a Medieval Convent (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 169; Ann Marie Caron, “The Continuum of Time and Eternity in the Liber specialis gratiae of Mechtild of Hackeborn (1241–99),” in Time and Eternity: The Medieval Discourse, ed. Gerhard Jaritz and Gerson Moreno-­Riaño (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003), 251–69 (“The image: ‘heart as ­house,’ ” 261). 71. ​LSG 1.19, pp. 61–62 (Newman, 77): “intimior sim omni intimo tuo”; Harrison, “Thousands and Thousands of Lovers,” 192. 72. ​LSG 2.2, p. 139 (Newman, 122).

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she wants more than anything is health, having been sick and almost e­ very day absent from choir for months, but still she says she wishes only to be in accord with his ­will, ­whether favorable or unfavorable.73 If Mechthild plays a game of deference with Christ, she is bound to win b­ ecause he is most worthy of her deference, yet he is bound to win b­ ecause she is most needing of his. On one occasion she does accept his offer, but for the good of the community: when he tells her, “Behold, I am yours and in your power, so lead me wherever you wish,” she leads him through the choir to the s­ isters, where he shows affection to each.74 Perhaps the most striking manifestation of the motif comes when he says he relinquishes his own ­will as fully as a dead body: sin leaves him bound to the cross, but with repentance a sinner releases him from the cross, and he falls upon that person just as he fell upon Joseph of Arimathea at his deposition from the cross, giving himself entirely into his power.75 Mechthild’s emphasis on the reception of Christ in the Eucharist might have led to a balanced emphasis on his divinity and his humanity, both received sacramentally, but the fusion of eucharistic and mystical themes has the effect of heightening the emphasis on his divinity: what she says of her reciprocal indwelling with Christ in communion is what elsewhere in the mystical tradition is said of relationship with the undivided God or deity. In the game of reciprocal deference it might seem that Christ is portrayed in his h ­ uman nature, especially when he recalls his agony in the garden or his deposition from the cross, but it is not his historical manifestation that comes to her and has or can relinquish power, but rather the divine person who stands outside of time and can enter into relationship with her by entering into time. Gertrude of Helfta, known as Gertrude the G ­ reat (1256–1302), entered the monastery school as a young girl at age five and was entrusted to the tutelage of the younger Mechthild. She too enjoyed revelations, which ­were enshrined in the Legatus divinae pietatis (The Herald of God’s Loving-­Kindness).76 Gertrude’s revelations of Christ are embedded in particularly full narration of personal experience. Book 1 of the Herald gives vari­ous testimonies to the authenticity of its revelations, and ­these include many stories pertaining to the 73. ​LSG 2.31, p. 176 (Newman, 137–38). 74. ​LSG 3.20, p. 223. 75. ​LSG 4.56, pp. 307–8. 76. ​On Gertrude of Helfta generally, see Michael Bangert, Freiheit des Herzens: Mystik bei Gertrud von Helfta (Münster: Lit, 2004); Siegfried Ringler, Auf bruch zu neuer Gottesrede: Die Mystik der Gertrud von Helfta (Ostfileern: Matthias-­Grünewald, 2008); Michael Anthony Abri, “Gertrude of Helfta’s Liturgical-­ Mystical Union,” Cistercian Studies Quarterly 43 (2008): 77–96; and Ella Johnson, This Is My Body: Eucharistic Theology and Anthropology in the Writings of Gertrude the ­Great of Helfta (Collegeville, MN: Cistercian Publications, 2020).

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life of Gertrude and her circle, while Book 2 has the form of an autobiographical meditation. The writings associated with Gertrude quickly became used as sources for collections of pious excerpts and prayers, which w ­ ere widely disseminated, as ­were similar excerpts from both Mechthilds; when ­these prayers ­were adapted and a­ dopted, the exceptional piety of Helfta was made accessible for more ordinary devotional use.77 In many ways the Herald closely resembles The Book of Special Grace. In both works Christ is pre­sent largely as a partner in dialogue, which frequently takes the form of question and response of magisterial discourse. As in The Book of Special Grace, so too in the Herald, while the Virgin Mary and other spiritual presences appear, it is Christ whose presence dominates. As in The Book of Special Grace, he is addressed both as “Lord” and as “God.” That the title “Lord” refers to Christ is clear from reference to what he has said in the gospels, or to his Passion, to the feelings he had while on earth, to the preaching during his ministry, to examples taken from his life, to his being sacrificed on the altar, to the wound in his side.78 When “the Lord” says, “My delight is to be with the sons of men [Prov 8:31] and I have left them this sacrament out of my g­ reat affection in memory of me . . . ​and in addition I have bound myself  . . . ​to remain with the faithful even to the consummation of the world [Matt 28:20],” he not only identifies himself but expresses both his commitment to remain pre­sent and the delight he has in d­ oing so.79 Christ may be addressed as “my God,” “most kindly God,” or “God the Creator,” and he may speak of himself as “I, the Lord God and your Lover, who by my freely given love created you,” but it is clear that Christ is meant when he is said to have been born on earth, to have wounded hands and feet, to have been betrayed by Judas, to have given the sacraments, to have made a promise to Peter.80 While God the ­Father is occasionally referred to, or the Trinity, it is Christ whose presence is clear throughout the work, and he himself can be referred to as “­father” or “merciful ­father” without being confused with God the ­Father.81

77. ​See Poor, Mechthild of Magdeburg and Her Book; Balázs Nemes, Von der Schrift zum Buch, von Ich zum Autor: Zur Text-­und Autorkonstitution in Überlieferung und Rezeption des ›Fließenden Lichts der Gottheit‹ Mechthilds von Magdeburg (Tübingen: Francke, 2010); Racha Kirakosian, From the Material to the Mystical in Late Medieval Piety: The Vernacular Transmission of Gertrude of Helfta’s Visions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021); Mechthild of Hackeborn and the Nuns of Helfta, The Book of Special Grace, trans. Barbara Newman (New York: Paulist, 2017), 31–32. 78. ​LDP 1.2.7, p. 132 (Barratt, 44); 1.3.6, p. 140 (Barratt, 48); 1.12.1, p. 186 (Barratt, 77); 1.14.4, p. 200 (Barratt, 84); 3.73.7, pp. 302–6 (Barratt, 205–6); 4.14.3, p. 156 (Barratt, 83); 4.31.1, p. 276 (Barratt, 157). 79. ​LDP 3.77.1, pp. 324–26 (Barratt, 218). 80. ​LDP 2.13.1, p. 282 (Barratt, 134); 2.4.2, p. 244 (Barratt, 110); 2.3.2, p. 238 (Barratt, 106); 4.14, pp. 152–62 (Barratt, 81–86); 1.14.2–4, pp. 196–98 (Barratt, 82–83). 81. ​E.g., LDP 4.5.3, p. 84 (Barratt, 40), and 4.14.6 (Barratt, 84).

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The revelations to Gertrude often give expression to autotheology. Christ refers to his own divinity and humanity, speaking as the divine person in whom both inhere,82 but recurrently he accentuates his divinity, referring to himself as “the all-­powerful and most kindly God” and speaking of his omnipotence and eternal or unsearchable wisdom.83 When he grants remission of sins, he does so “by virtue of my divinity.”84 His heart is, repeatedly, “my divine Heart.”85 Book 2 of the Herald is, however, distinctive. It is the one part of the text ascribed to Gertrude’s own hand. More than the rest of the work, book 2 has the character of an extended meditation, largely addressed to Christ. Statements are ascribed to him h ­ ere and t­ here, but the book represents mostly Gertrude’s own voice, her expression of what it means to live in Christ’s presence. While elsewhere in the Herald the presence of Christ is evident from his communication, Book 2 speaks often of his presence without indicating that he speaks, although already in the prologue we are told that Gertrude “held intimate converse with her Beloved.”86 Early in her autobiographical account Gertrude says to Christ that her heart of clay “realized that you had indeed come and w ­ ere t­ here pre­sent.” Often and in many guises he communicated to her the sensation of his presence. He related to her “in super­natural and hidden ways” taking constant plea­sure with her soul as friend with friend, or rather husband with wife. Apart from one interval of eleven days, not for the blink of an eye did she sense him absent. “On the contrary, I knew you ­were always with me whenever I made my way into my innermost being.”87 It had been characteristic of meditations at least from the time of Anselm of Canterbury that they could shift from one addressee to another: from Christ to the Virgin, to the soul, and so forth. In keeping with this tendency, more than in the other books, Gertrude in Book 2 speaks at times to God the ­Father, 82. ​E.g., LDP 3.7.1, p. 30 (Barratt, 38); 3.55.1, p. 236 (Barratt, 167); 4.9.1, p. 110 (Barratt, 55); 4.10.3, p. 124 (Barratt, p. 62). The wording is always divinitas and humanitas, sometimes tota divinitas mea. See LDP 1.14.6 (Barratt, 85), where the humanity and divinity are parapets on an allegorical bridge leading to Christ. 83. ​E.g., LDP 3.36.1, p. 176 (Barratt, 128); 3.38.2, p. 182 (Barratt, 132); 3.50.1, p. 220, (Barratt, 157); 4.13.4, p. 148 (Barratt, 79); 4.59.1, p. 478 (Barratt, 287); 3.34.1, p. 174 (Barratt, 125); 2.19, p. 304 (Barratt, 148–49); 3.83.2, pp. 336–38 (Barratt, 229). 84. ​LDP prologue to Book 4, p. 112 (Barratt, 33) (“ex virtute divinitatis”); 4.2.13, p. 42 (Barratt, 19) (“auctoritate meae divinitatis”). See also LDP 4.14.7, p. 162 (Barratt, 85) (“Misereatur vestri divinitas mea”). 85. ​E.g., LDP 1.16.1, p. 210 (Barratt, 90) (twice). 86. ​LDP prologue to Book 2, p. 226 (Barratt, 99) (“cum dilecto in secreto confabulans”). 87. ​LDP 2.3.2, p. 236 (Barratt, 106); 2.11.1, p. 276 (Barratt, 129); 2.23.5, p. 334 (Barratt, 164–65); 2.23.6, pp. 334–36 (Barratt, 165). The theme does occur also in 1.16.6 (Barratt, 92), where Gertrude says she has “notitiam divinae praesentiae,” but it is thematized especially in Book 2.

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who does not speak back to her,88 and she can speak at some length without specifying whom she is addressing. But mainly she speaks to Christ, as passing reference to “your deified Heart,” “your most blessed ­mother,” “your most holy Nativity,” “your kindly ­Father,” or “your glorious ­mother” makes clear.89 Two striking chapters in Book 2 call for special attention, chapters 20 and 21. In the first of ­these, Gertrude addresses her divine lover with a breathless litany of exalted titles: “sweetest God,” “heavenly Governor,” “kindly God,” “merciful God,” “my good God.” Dwelling on high, he looks down upon the lowly (Psalm 112:5–6 in the Vulgate). Apart from all his other ­favors, he has allowed her an intimate u ­ nion with himself in which, in his mad love, he takes deep plea­sure. In granting her this ­union, he has opened his deified heart with his two hands, ordered her to put her own right hand inside it, then snapped it shut, catching her hand in it, and exclaiming, “­There! I promise to maintain in their integrity the gifts I have conferred on you.” If for any reason he suspends his f­ avors temporarily, he commits himself to make up threefold for the deprivation. All this he promises “on behalf of the omnipotence, wisdom and goodness of the sovereign Trinity, in whose m ­ iddle I live and reign, true God through everlasting ages.”90 That this passage provides ­little evidence of increasing devotion to the humanity of Christ perhaps need not be belabored. It is so resolutely focused on the divine personage that the reader might pardonably be unaware that the addressee is Christ, that he is the one who grants the f­ avors and captures her in ­union with himself by trapping her hand in his heart. The best evidence that all this is about Christ, apart from Gertrude’s generally Christocentric piety, is subtle and comes only at the end, which is adapted from a standard liturgical formula. Prayers at the altar are generally addressed to God the F ­ ather, but they often conclude by appealing to the ­Father through the Son, “who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit,” and in this passage it is Christ the Son who says of himself, “I live and reign” in the m ­ iddle of the Trinity, meaning as the second of three persons. Christ has bound himself by the omnipotence that is traditionally ascribed to the F ­ ather, the wisdom of the Son, and the goodness of the Spirit, but he himself, as a member of the Trinity, is the one who lives and reigns in its midst, as Christ does in the liturgical 88. ​LDP 2.16.2, p. 292 (Barratt, 140); 2.18, pp. 300–2 (Barratt, 146–47); 2.23.22, pp. 346–48 (Barratt, 170); 2.23.3–4, p. 332 (Barratt, 163–64); 2.24.1, pp. 350–52 (Barratt, 173). See also LDP 4.2.1, p. 22 (Barratt, 9), and 4.2.2, p. 24 (Barratt, 10), where the ­Father does speak to her. 89. ​LDP 2.23.8, p. 338 (Barratt, 166); 2.23.11, p. 340 (Barratt, 167); 2.23.13, p. 340 (Barratt, 167); 2.23.17, p. 344 (Barratt, 169); 2.23.20, p. 346 (Barratt, 169). 90. ​LDP 2.20, pp. 308–20 (Barratt, 150–56). The conclusion (­here slightly adapted) reads “ex parte Omnipotentiae, Sapientiae et Benignitatis virtuosae Trinitatis, in cujus medio ego vivo et regno, verus Deus, per aeterna saecula saeculorum.”

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formula. In a passage where Gertrude is speaking of privileges bestowed upon her, it might be sufficient for her to protest her unworthiness, as indeed she does, but beyond that she heightens the degree of the ­favor, widens the gap between the divine giver and herself as the recipient, and gives assurance that the promises can be not only given but maintained, all by presenting Christ as a divine trickster who is so bent on using her that he binds both her and himself in a relationship empowering to her, delightful to him, and useful to o ­ thers. The following chapter is devoted to a vision of the divine face. It begins by quoting a responsory used in the liturgy for the second Sunday in Lent: “I have seen you face to face,” which alludes to the claim of Jacob a­ fter wrestling with the angel, “I have seen God face to face, and [yet] my life has been saved.”91 What is unexpectedly saved in this encounter with God is, in the Vulgate, Jacob’s anima, which can mean his life but could also refer to his soul. “In the light of divine revelation,” Gertrude goes on, “I saw what seemed to be a face, right up against my own.” She refers to a description of such experience in the work of Bernard of Clairvaux, where it pertains to the awareness of Christ as the mystical bridegroom.92 In her vision she saw eyes like suns directly up against her own eyes, and she realized that not just her soul but her heart and all of her body ­were affected. An indescribable light from t­hose “deifying eyes” penetrated through her own eyes, into her inner self, affecting all her limbs. Not even in heaven would she have expected such an extraordinary vision. To be sure, she realized that this experience did not exhaust the force of the divine gaze, which is tempered to suit the person and circumstances in which it is bestowed. But just as she has often experienced a repeated spiritual kiss while reading the canonical hours, or vigils for the deceased, or a single psalm, so too she has noticed the divine gaze directed often at her.93 Once again the first question must be how we know that it is specifically Christ whose gaze she has seen, and again the best clue is subtle and liturgical. The face Gertrude has seen is “that most desirable face” (illam desideratissimam faciem), which alludes to a hymn sung in Eastertide, “Tristes erant apostoli.” The relevant line from this hymn, as it was sung in medieval liturgy (­later it was heavi­ly revised), says that ­after Christ’s resurrection the disciples hastened into Galilee “to see the desirable face of the Lord.”94 The face is by implication that of Christ’s glorified body that the saints would behold in heaven. As in chapter 20, a maximal heightening of Christ’s divine glory intensifies the ex91. ​Genesis 32:30, “Vidi Deum facie ad faciem, et salva facta est anima mea.” 92. ​Bernard of Clairvaux, Song of Songs, 2, sermon 31.6, 3:129. 93. ​LDP 2.21, pp. 321–26 (Barratt, 157–59). 94. ​“Quo agnito discipuli / in Galilaeam propere/ pergunt videre faciem / desideratam Domini.” The editor of the text calls attention to this allusion.

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tent of his condescension: stupefying as Gertrude’s vision was for her, it was nonetheless a modified manifestation of Christ’s true glory, the voltage being lowered as an accommodation to her. While this cannot be called a new incarnation of Christ, still it involves a condescension analogous to that of Christ’s entry into flesh. In the Synoptic gospels, at least, it was only in the Transfiguration that the full glory of Christ was revealed; other­wise it was tempered and accommodated to the circumstances of Christ’s life. Gertrude’s vision narrative recalls the revelation of Christ transfigured on Mount Tabor, and the gospel reading for the date on which she had this vision would have told of Christ’s Transfiguration (Matthew 17:1–9), but even so this was a revelation not of Christ’s full divinity but of only what she was capable of receiving. With Mechthild of Hackeborn and Gertrude of Helfta, then, the tendencies seen in ­earlier writings are more forcefully asserted: a strong emphasis on Christ’s divine power and glory, unhesitating reference to him as “God,” and reference to his humanity chiefly in contexts where it is clear that the eternally divine person bears both the divine nature and the assumed h ­ uman nature. Even the heart of Christ, a famous theme characteristic of the Helfta lit­er­a­ture to which we ­will return in a ­later chapter, is referred to as his divine heart. And references to his life on earth are mostly sidelong glances making clear that the Christ made manifest to Mechthild and Gertrude is the same person who became incarnate historically and remains transtemporally pre­sent. Even their revelations in Holy Week, as we ­shall see, take gospel events more as points of departure than as foci of attention. This tendency does not set the younger Mechthild and Gertrude apart from their contemporaries, but brings them into concord with widespread devotional usage. They share with broader devotional culture a strong tendency to think and speak of Christ as “God.” They are exceptional in their experience of this divine Christ, but ordinary in their conception of him. Along with a high Christology, the lit­er­a­ture of Helfta contains a high Mariology: the Virgin, too, is frequently exalted as the majestic queen of heaven. In one tradition not included in the standard edition of the Herald, Gertrude has a vision of the Virgin seated with her Son in imperial glory. She greets the Virgin and asks her to intercede for her, then she sees the Virgin kneel before her Son. At first the Virgin is positioned between Gertrude and Christ, blocking his view of Gertrude, so Christ has to ask his ­mother to stand aside so he can see who it is for whom she is praying.95 The text says the Virgin formed a kind of shading or umbrella that kept Gertrude hidden,96 which could be 95. ​Universitätsbibliothek Leipzig, Ms 827, fol. 53r–54r. 96. ​“Et dominus, ‘Cede mater, ut eam intuear,’ videbatur enim quod ipsa mater misericordie, inter dominum et eandem personam stans, quasi umbraculum faceret.”

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read as suggesting that the Virgin can be an obstacle to immediate access to her Son, but Gertrude had specifically asked the Virgin to act as intercessor. What the story makes clear is the exalted yet secondary role of the intercessor who, having served her purpose, must then step aside to allow direct relationship with Christ.97 Directly and indirectly, the writings from Helfta had profound impact on the spiritual culture of the late medieval West through their dissemination, translation, and excerpting for devout anthologies. That pro­cess is impor­tant for an understanding of how the exceptional became ordinary—or, more precisely, how writings associated with a saintly figure ­were appropriated for the use of ­others, largely but not exclusively nuns, who found in them devotional material useful for their own piety. Racha Kirakosian has revealed how the Herald was translated and adapted in the vernacular already in the ­fourteenth ­century and widely disseminated among reformed Dominican convents, as well as among communities of Franciscans and Dominicans, Cistercians and Augustinians. She suggests that the first German translation was done by a Carthusian monk, which would be in keeping with the prominence of the Carthusians, in Germany and elsewhere, in the cura animarum studiosarum. But the transmission was not ­limited to translation or passive reception; the text was consciously reworked, taken over into florilegia, and made to serve purposes of l­ater medieval culture. The ­earlier “standard” edition of the Herald had been a collaborative undertaking, and the ­later reworking, Kirakosian says, “does not represent discontinuous productions but a continuation of collective redactorial pro­cesses.” If readers chose to read a vernacular version of the text, that was not necessarily ­because they ­were unable to read Latin, but ­because they chose to have a new German version perhaps alongside the Latin prototype. At a time when Bonaventure’s retelling the life of Saint Francis had opened the door to creative retelling, the writer who reworked an e­ arlier text might well be recognized as not simply a redactor but an auctor.98 The fluidity of German reworkings could move in vari­ous directions. They might introduce mystical language into the devotionalism of the text, telling how Gertrude was mystically united with Christ as iron melts in fire. A manuscript with marginal notes and tabs that shows it was much used might take vernacular material on Gertrude and interrupt it with other texts. Another manuscript could take passages related to Gertrude and combine them with 97. ​Gertrud Jaron Lewis, “Maria im mystischen Werk Gertruds von Helfta,” in Vor dir steht die leere Schale meiner Sehnsucht«: Die Mystik der Frauen von Helfta, 2nd ed., ed. Michael Bangert and Hildegund Keul (Leipzig: Benno, 1999), 81–94. 98. ​Kirakosian, From the Material to the Mystical in Late Medieval Piety, 7, 52–55, 57.

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passages from the sister-­books and the lives of other holy individuals. A miscellany of material on the Passion might borrow from the traditions of Gertrude, telling how Christ had instructed her to read the narrative of his Passion and write down what she found t­ here, somewhat as the compiler of this manuscript was transcribing but also reworking material from other sources. The prayers Gertrude wrote for the days before Lent, known as Carnival prayers, ­were adapted to condemn the Carnival cele­brations of the late fifteenth ­century, such as cross-­dressing. Prayers from Gertrude might have “IHS” in the margin, reminding us that the lit­er­a­ture of Helfta was being taken over and adapted by a culture deeply indebted to Henry Suso, devotee of that Christogram.99 In all ­these ways the Herald entered into a complex and fluid devotional culture that suited the needs of individuals who would never have thought themselves exceptional as Gertrude herself was.

Christina of Hane The Premonstratensian nun Christina of Hane (1269–ca. 1292) entered the convent at Hane (west of Worms) at age six but in her late teens was stricken with a debilitating illness that led to early death.100 She was a con­temporary of Mechthild of Hackeborn and Gertrude of Helfta, but the account of her experience, unlike theirs, was evidently written not by a fellow nun but by a male hagiographer, not in Latin but in vernacular dialect. Certain features of her vita, such as a vision of Christ’s divine heart, suggest parallels and perhaps connections with Helfta. Still, it is difficult to situate this text chronologically, ­because even if it was first written late in the thirteenth c­ entury, it seems to have been heavi­ly redacted in the f­ourteenth ­century, perhaps even the fifteenth, with a ­g reat deal of material that closely resembles and is surely indebted to the mysticism of Meister Eckhart.101 At the end of the vita the clerical hagiographer or a redactor gives an explicit endorsement of traditional Christology, reminding the reader that Christ “took on ­human nature—­not the h ­ uman person.”102 The text is impor­tant for us ­because it clearly employs

99. ​Kirakosian, From the Material to the Mystical, 51, 70, 74, 84–85, 93–99. 100. ​Racha Kirakosian, Die Vita der Christina von Hane: Untersuchung und Edition (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017); Racha Kirakosian, trans., The Life of Christina of Hane (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2020). 101. ​See especially Racha Kirakosian, “Which Is the Greatest: Knowledge, Love, or Enjoyment of God? A Comparison between Christina of Hane and Meister Eckhart,” Medieval Mystical Theology 23 (2014): 20–33. 102. ​VCH c. 100 (trans., 97).

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all four of the narrative strategies for repre­sen­ta­tion of Christ, with strong emphasis on his divinity. As Racha Kirakosian has shown, Christina’s voice is heard at first only in indirect speech, then her statements are embedded diegetically within the narrative, while only ­toward the end of the vita are they given in first-­person report.103 ­There is correspondingly a series of shifts in the repre­sen­ta­tion of Christ’s voice. In chapters 4–39 Christ’s locutions are for the most part subordinated to the narrative and are not sustained at length. T ­ here is occasional short dialogue. At one point Christ speaks in Christina’s soul, where she is able to understand Latin. On another occasion the child Christ sings to her. Exceptionally, God the ­Father also speaks, and one chapter consists of ten items of divine wisdom revealed to her by God.104 It is the following section of the vita, chapters 40–95, that is devoted chiefly to magisterial discourse, although the manner shifts as the text proceeds. The chapters are keyed to liturgical feasts, which rarely have clear relevance to the content. Christ addresses Christina, first in a series of brief sayings, then in longer discourse with occasional dialogue, and fi­nally in extended monologue. Increasingly he addresses her soul: “O my chosen soul,” “O gentle soul of mine,” “O holiest soul of mine,” and the like. His discourse often consists of autotheology, somewhat in the manner of the “I am” sayings in John’s gospel: “I am the eternal light,” “I am the living mirror which illuminates heaven and earth,” or “I  am a burning God, I am a power­ful God, I am an illuminating God.” He speaks a g­ reat deal more of his divine than of his h ­ uman nature, but on occasion it is clear that the divine person is speaking of both natures: “I have led my sheep . . . ​into the ineffable light of my divinity and into the glory of my humanity.” His two natures have dif­fer­ent but correlative relevance to her experience: it is the suffering of his humanity that she must endure in her illness (“As my humanity trembled on the cross, so ­shall you ­tremble for five hours on account of love”), but it is the power of his divinity that fulfils his ­will in her.105 A brief section at the end, chapters  96–100, gives Christina herself as the first-­person speaker and is devoted to a mixture of visionary and other narrative that includes dialogue with Christ. It is only in chapters 97–98 that a lively exchange of questions and answers gives a clear sense of magisterial interaction similar to that between a teacher and a student. ­Whether Christ’s voice is in monologue or dialogue, in shorter or longer units of discourse, he is decidedly a mystical teacher. Even when he gives her 103. ​Kirakosian, Die Vita der Christina von Hane, 145–66. 104. ​VCH c. 21 and c. 24 (trans., 27 and 30–31) (dialogue); c. 10 (trans., 15) (Latin); c. 34 (trans., 41) (song); c. 32 (trans., 38) (­Father); c. 38 (trans., 44–46) (ten items of wisdom). 105. ​VCH c. 43 (trans., 48); c. 45 (trans. . 48; c. 53 (trans. 51; c. 57 (trans. 55); c. 65 (trans. 63) (given ­here with slight alterations).

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instruction in seven precepts, t­ hese are largely mystical counsels: she should withdraw herself from worldly affairs, direct her thought and contemplation to God, and cultivate desire for her Beloved, which “brings divine espousal.”106 He speaks a ­g reat deal about himself but also about her mystical relationship with him: “In your soul and in all your limbs I work the deeds of high love through the unification of your ­will with my divinity, and with the pure knowledge of my divinity. . . . ​The living you heal lovingly before me as I have lovingly redeemed them on the cross with my precious blood and my ­Father’s power. . . . ​You have reached into my highest throne, that is my honor, and high imperial stream, and the stream of sweet love. The latter has flowed through your soul, and it lowers you consistently into my divinity; and the power of your love flows back into me.”107 The transtemporality of Christ is a pervasive theme in the vita. On one Holy Friday, Christina herself experiences a kind of retrojection, witnessing “in spirit” all the sufferings of Christ and the places in which they occurred, but then on Easter she sees a projection of the risen Christ, who embraces her, kisses her, then leads her out to the churchyard and blesses one of the tombstones, a­ fter which she has a vision of souls rising to heaven, including that of the person buried in that grave. The historical resurrection of Christ is echoed by the rising of that soul. On the feast of the Nativity, the historical event and the pre­sent reliving of the event are bonded by an outburst of heavenly light at the moment of Christ’s birth. For the breaking through of the eternal into time, perhaps the most dramatic symbolic repre­sen­ta­tion comes when Christina is at mass and sees an altar hovering in the air at which Christ himself is the priest. He wears a chasuble that is so transparent that she can see through him, which implies that he too is transparent. At the moment of the elevation a fiery light bursts forth, extending to all the saints in heaven, on earth, and in purgatory.108 At the fraction Christ breaks the host into three parts, each of which bears the Crucified with bleeding wounds. The symbolic meaning of this vision must begin with the suspension of the altar in the air, as if it stands above the temporal order of earth. The power of the sacrament 106. ​VCH c. 29 (trans., 34–35). 107. ​VCH cc. 58–59 (trans., 57, slightly altered). 108. ​For the theme of purgatory in Christina, see Racha Kirakosian, “Penitential Punishment and Purgatory: A Drama of Purification through Pain,” in Punishment and Penitential Practices in Medieval German Writing, ed. Sarah Bowden and Annette Volfing (London: King’s College London, Centre for Late Antique & Medieval Studies, 2018), 129–154, and Racha Kirakosian, “Rhe­torics of Sanctity: Christina of Hane in the Early Modern Period, with a Comparison to a Mary Magdalene Legend,” Oxford German Studies 43 (2014): 380–99.

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radiates out to saints living and dead, t­ hose whose earthly lives are pre­sent or past. The historical Passion of Christ is given pre­sent manifestation in the fragmented host, which has been broken by the Christ who broke bread on Holy Thursday in anticipation of his body being broken on the cross, but now the eternal Christ is the one whose breaking is experienced by Christina during the mass she is attending on earth and within time.109 The connection between transtemporality and visions “in the air” is corroborated by another event that does not involve Christ. Christina saw “above herself, up in the air,” that a man was in the pro­cess of murdering his wife, that the wife was damned ­because she had planned to murder her husband, that the husband “transported” the corpse to the convent for burial (although he had not quite yet arrived), and that he would die a terrible death (as soon happened).110 In other words, her vision was of one event occurring at the time indicated, a second event that was intended but not carried out, a third event that was about to occur, and a fourth that would take place at a ­f uture date. Christina seems to have “seen” this entire sequence si­mul­ta­neously, or at least in a single visionary sequence, “in the air,” as if in a manner that transcended ordinary perception of time. The third narrative strategy, depiction of Christ’s divinized humanity, is perhaps less strongly developed in Christina’s life than in other texts, but versions of it can be found in this vita. Precisely at the moments when Christ enters into the material world, the flesh he assumes is a kind of glorified flesh. Christina sees the newborn child Christ come in the sunlight, playing with the sun and wishing to make the sun itself into a bed.111 But it is mainly when Christ comes in the Eucharist, again in bodily form, that he glows. She receives communion, and the infirmary is filled with divine light, or a bright light embraces her soul.112 A priest carries the sacrament, and she sees the Lord he is bringing as a bright light, or she sees a fiery light in which Christ comes forth with a retinue of angels, like a king surrounded by an army of knights. Again, when the priest brings the sacrament, she sees a light shining through the walls, and she says this is not a miracle, ­because God actually is a burning fire.113 In another case it is difficult to distinguish between Christ’s divinized humanity and Christ whose divinity is manifested in such a physical way that his 109. ​VCH cc. 19–20 (trans., 24–25) (Good Friday and Easter); c. 33 (trans., 39; c. 34 (trans., 40–41) (Nativity). 110. ​VCH c. 25 (trans., 31–32). On another occasion she saw past and f­ uture events together not “in the air” but “inwardly in spirit”; VCH, c. 26 (trans., 32–33). 111. ​VCH c. 3, p. 3. 112. ​VCH c. 20 (trans., 25), c. 30 (trans., 35). 113. ​VCH c. 22 (trans., 28); c. 32 (trans., 7); c. 36 (trans., 42).

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body acts upon and interacts with hers. Sitting alone in her choir stall at night, she sees Christ “with the eyes of her soul” in the form of an ea­gle that hovers above her. He then plunges into her soul, presumably now in h ­ uman form, embraces it with his divine but anthropomorphic arms, o ­ rders her to embrace him with her bodily arms, and presses her to his heart. The next morning when she receives communion, the heavens open and a vast light shines forth, in which she sees a living heart from which again wondrous light shines. She wishes for the heart and the light to enter her soul. They do so, and cause her body to become so hot that she cannot be cooled by cold ­water. With her Beloved intruding into her soul, it seems as if her body may be ripped apart from inside.114 At neither phase is Christ’s humanity expressly mentioned, but in the nighttime vision he has arms that can intertwine with hers, and a heart to which hers can be pressed, and in the morning he comes as a luminous heart that infuses bodily heat. Christ’s divinity has power­ful impact on Christina’s body, but only ­because he too has physical qualities that imply a ­human nature. Christina’s vita is an extreme case of the fourth strategy, devotional fused with mystical piety, although the devotional ele­ment is strongest in the ­earlier sections (­earlier in the text and also and its composition), while ­later sections become overwhelmingly mystical. The e­ arlier chapters of the vita tell of her devotion to the child Christ, to the Eucharist, and to the Passion. They tell how for years she is devoted to meditation on the Passion and on the “groundless love” that compelled Christ to undergo that Passion. Her compassion for him is so ­g reat that she often faints. As a sign of her compassion, she sees “a drop of her heart’s blood” fall from her left eye and land on her ring fin­ger.115 In the ­later chapters, theocentric and Christocentric mysticism, apophatic and cataphatic, speculative and bridal themes all mingle and fuse, perhaps most forcefully in chapter 80, in which Christina herself tells how her heart and intellect are raised up to recognize divine ­things. She desires to know and taste how sweet her lover is. Her body as well as her soul is raised up. Love and desire cause her soul to become drunk on the inpouring of the Holy Spirit. She is enraptured and sleeps in contemplation of God and in the arms of her bridegroom, who reveals many ­things hidden in God. Divine light pours into her and makes her soul and God one spirit. Her soul “becomes God with God, fully unified with God”; it becomes soft and flows like molten wax into the divine image. During ­union of her soul with God, her lover speaks, urging her to rejoice and sing his name, “which I have grounded in you.” She is betrothed to him in eternity, and he has redeemed her with his blood. She is heir 114. ​VCH c. 21 (trans., 26-27). 115. ​VCH cc. 16–17 (trans., 20–22).

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to his eternal divinity “and a partaker in the threefold unity.”116 Is Christ her lover the same as the God with whom she is fully unified? Elsewhere the language of u ­ nion is used both ways: she is “wholly united” with Christ, and she enters into Christ’s divinity, but her soul is unified also with God, as if she and God w ­ ere “alone in heaven, with no one e­ lse pre­sent,” and indeed it seems as if “she w ­ ere God with God” and that “God willed what­ever she willed.”117 On one reading she means “Christ” when she says “God,” and the mysticism is thoroughly Christocentric.118 On another reading Christ plays a role in her attainment of u ­ nion with the undifferentiated deity, although not clearly an instrumental or subsidiary role. Yet another possibility is that the bridal themes are vestiges of an e­ arlier version of the vita, prior to the more Eckhartian redaction, but that begs the question of how the themes are meant to be related in the text as we have it. The most plausible interpretation is surely that in this received redaction Christina is so attentive to Christ’s divine nature that Christocentric and theocentric ­union are alternative ways of expressing the same experience. Nor is this a unique case, for Adelheid Langmann also combined the theme of Christ as bridegroom with the more speculative motif of the child “born spiritually within her.”119 The emphasis on Christ’s divinity and on mystical ­union in the l­ater sections is so strong that the reader might forget at times that when she is spoken to, it is Christ her bridegroom who speaks, but then he speaks of himself as “God and h ­ uman” and refers to his ­Father. Christina sees that “God is everywhere,” more in good ­people than in ­others, and it is “God” who reveals his divinity, and she is herself united with “God,” but then it is “God” who is wounded in the Passion and pours out his blood into t­hose who remain faithful.120 The l­ ater sections of the vita are drenched with mystical themes, yet devotional meditation is not entirely left ­behind. The same chapter that emphasizes how God is everywhere, how the soul is united with God, and how God reveals his divinity concludes by returning to the theme of Christ’s Passion, in which he poured out his blood and was wounded by love.121 Again we might posit that this surprising hint of devotionalism is a vestige of an ­earlier version of the text, but in the text as it stands it serves as a reminder that Chris116. ​VCH c. 80 (trans., 74–77). 117. ​VCH c. 24 (trans., 31); c. 44 (trans., 48); c. 47 (trans., 49); c. 58 (trans., 5)7; c. 59 (trans., 57); c. 65 (trans., 63); c. 78 (trans., 72–73); c. 79 (trans., 74); c. 81 (trans., 77; c. 82 (trans., 78–79). 118. ​The text often does use “God” for “Christ”: e.g., VCH c. 2 (trans., 2); c. 31 (trans., 37; c. 97 (trans., 92). 119. ​See Hindsley, The Mystics of Engelthal, p. 63. 120. ​VCH c. 95 (trans., 86–89) (“God and ­human”); c. 97 (trans., 90–92) (blood). 121. ​VCH, c. 97 (trans., 90–92).

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tina has been brought to her mystical contemplation through her devotional meditation.

Fourteenth-­Century German Writings The tendency to accentuate the divinity of Christ was continued in l­ ater writings, but with varying nuance. T ­ hese ­later works not only accentuate the divinity of Christ but often depict his humanity as “divinized” or sharing in the qualities of his divinity. Margaret Ebner (ca. 1291–1351) was a nun in the Dominican community at Mödingen in Bavarian Swabia.122 During the last two de­cades of her life she was ­under the influence of Henry of Nördlingen, a connecting figure who maintained contact with not only her but other female and male mystics of southern Germany. Henry recommended to o ­ thers the work of Mechthild of Magdeburg, which he translated into High German, and he urged that they too should write down their experiences of revelation. In the account of her revelations, Margaret, like the ­sisters of Helfta, regularly speaks of Christ as God: it is “God, Jesus Christ” who is her only beloved; it is God who has Saint John as his beloved disciple; it is God who endured suffering; it is her Lord and God who speaks to her about his ­mother; when she receives communion she has “the living power of God,” his body and blood, within her.123 He lavishes his grace upon Margaret, being near to her soul as her Lord and God and as her spouse. But again, as in the writings from Helfta, Christ himself speaks as the eternal person who possesses both divinity and humanity: as ­little as his divinity can separate from his humanity, so ­little does he wish to separate himself from her; he speaks of Margaret’s friend as a joy to his divinity and a follower of his humanity, whom he w ­ ill draw into the incomprehensible essence of his divinity.124 When Margaret hears the Passion narrative, she is overwhelmed with pain and with love for the God who is pre­sent to her with a bond of shared and sympathetic suffering.125 We have already seen the concept of deified humanity in the work of Angela of Foligno, where it tends to be complicated and problematized, and in 122. ​Patricia Zimmerman Backman, “The Power of Books and the Practice of Mysticism in the ­ ourteenth ­Century: Heinrich of Nördlingen and Margaret Ebner on Mechthild’s Flowing Light of the F Godhead,” Church History: Studies in Chris­tian­ity and Culture 76 (2007): 61–83. 123. ​ME pp. 29, 74, 86, 89 (Hindsley, 101, 125, 132, 133). 124. ​ME pp. 150, 73, 76 (Hindsley, 106, 125, 126). 125. ​ME p. 51 (Hindsley, 112). Hindsley renders “in der mitlidenden gegenwertiket gocz” as “in sympathy for the Lord God pre­sent in me.” In context it is clear that the suffering is mutual.

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Christina of Hane, where it is found mainly in connection with the Eucharist. The notion of a divinized humanity was not inherently problematic; John of Damascus had spoken of the flesh or ­human nature of Christ as “deified,” and Thomas Aquinas explained that this meant simply that the h ­ uman nature was united with the Word, thus becoming “the flesh of the Word of God” without becoming God, and without e­ ither nature losing its own properties.”126 The writings from fourteenth-­century Germany, however, often suggest a Christology sometimes called Miaphysite: Christ bears both a divine and a ­human nature, but they are fused, so that one can speak of his humanity as divinized.127 Something of this sort can be seen in an extended prayer that Margaret Ebner recited regularly. She called this prayer her Pater Noster,128 which would suggest that it is addressed to God the ­Father, but in fact it is directed to Christ. It recalls the love and mercy that flow “out of your eternal divinity from heaven to earth.” It then calls to mind the works of love done in his “sacred h ­ uman life.” It speaks of the u ­ nion between Christ and a soul “graced with your divinity,” to whom he has lowered himself “with all divine nobility” and impressed with his “divine power.” Then it asks for strength from his “glorified, grace-­filled humanity.”129 No doubt all this is orthodox in intention, but the wording raises without fully answering the question how exactly Christ’s humanity is fused with his overpowering divinity. This sense of a fusion of Christ’s divine and ­human natures can be seen also in the “sister-­books” that emerged from the Dominican convents of southern Germany and German-­speaking Switzerland in the ­fourteenth ­century.130 126. ​Saint John of Damascus, The Orthodox Faith, bk. 3, c. 17 (“On the deification of the nature of the Lord’s flesh, and on that of His ­will”) in Writings, trans. Frederic H. Chase Jr. (New York: ­Fathers of the Church, 1958), pp. 316–18; St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiæ, part 3, qu. 2, art. 1, reply obj. 3, in vol. 48, trans. R.J. Hennessey (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1976), 40–41. 127. ​­Whether the term “Miaphysite” is appropriate depends on ­whether that term, often applied to Cyril of Alexandria, refers to a single, composite nature or rather to Christ’s single person or hypostasis (for which physis is used). John McGuckin, Saint Cyril of Alexandria and the Christological Controversy (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2004), takes the latter position. 128. ​ME pp. 161–66 (Hindsley, 173–78, with commentary on 64–66). 129. ​­Here too “divinity” is substituted for “Godhead.” See Barbara Koch, “Margaret Ebner,” in Medieval Holy W ­ omen in the Christian Tradition, c. 1100–­c. 1500, ed. Alastair Minnis and Rosalynn Voaden (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010), 394–95. 130. ​On the sister-­books generally, see Lewis, By ­Women, for ­Women, about ­Women; John Van Engen, “Communal Life: The Sister-­Books,” in Medieval Holy W ­ omen in the Christian Tradition, c. 1100–­c. 1500, ed. Alastair Minnis and Rosalynn Voaden (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010), 105–31; Anne Winston-­Allen, Convent Chronicles: W ­ omen Writing About ­Women and Reform in the Late ­Middle Ages (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003); and Judith Oliver, “Worship of the Word: Some Gothic Nonnenbücher in Their Devotional Context,” in ­Women and the Book: Assessing the Visual Evidence, ed. Jane H. M. Taylor and Lesley Smith (London: British Library, 1997), 106–22. On the Unterlinden convent, see Charles Wittmer, L’obituaire des dominicaines d’Unterlinden: édition critique du manuscrit 576 de la Bibliothèque de la ville de Colmar (Strasbourg: P.H. Heitz, 1946).

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­ hese ­were writings, mostly in the vernacular, that recounted the experiences T not just of one singularly pious nun but of several nuns within a community, particularly in its formative years. In ­these books Christ is insistently pre­sent, often appearing as a child or as the suffering Man of Sorrows. Repeatedly he is spoken of as God: a nun is raised up to the cross and embraced by “God,” “God” speaks to a nun of Kirchberg and says he has enlivened her soul with his “living body” and drawn it into his divinity, a s­ ister of Töss wishes to suffer with “God” all that he suffered in his Passion, “God” gives himself to a nun of Oetenbach in communion, and a s­ ister of Adelhausen has a vision of “God” about to be tortured.131 When Christ’s humanity is mentioned, it is often marked in one way or other as a divinized humanity. Near the end of her life, when a nun of Unterlinden feared she might die suddenly and unprepared, without the sacraments, Christ appeared to her visibly “in the form of his most divine humanity,” taking away her sadness and assuring her she would not die suddenly or without sacramental ministration.132 Christ was capable of bursting forth on any scene, in ­human form but with divine power. Another ­sister of Unterlinden, segregated from the community for years ­because of illness, suddenly sees a light from heaven shine in her cell. Christ himself is suddenly pre­sent, promising to take her to himself at her death.133 The divinization of Christ’s humanity manifested as a kind of mystical light is a theme found particularly in the sister-­book from Adelhausen. One Easter when the nuns received communion, Adelheit of Wendlingen saw the hosts shining with a wondrous light, and she perceived how the divinity shone through the humanity of Christ pre­sent in the consecrated wafers, and then she saw t­hose who received them shining with the same light. Geri Küchlin prayed that Christ might take her suffering from her. He came to her in a g­ reat light, pointed to the fresh wounds he suffered for her sake, and said she must bear her suffering patiently, for he was with her and would remain with her in all her l­abors, never leaving her. When Adelheit of Wendlingen lay on her deathbed, Christ appeared in a burst of light and sat before her.134 Passages of this sort, modeled no doubt on the Transfiguration narrative, suggest that at times the divinity of Christ shines so brilliantly that it may be pos­si­ble not to recognize that it is Christ, and yet it is. The same Adelhausen sister-­book also 131. ​For ­these examples, see the references in Lewis, By W ­ omen, for ­Women, about ­Women, 109, 158, 188, 197. 132. ​SB Unterlinden, 379–80: “in specie diuinissime humanitatis sue.” 133. ​SB Unterlinden, 378–79. 134. ​SB Adelhausen, 184, 185. When Reinlint of Vilingen beholds God united with her soul, as a pure light, h ­ ere too it is pos­si­ble that “God” means “Christ,” although the text is not explicit on this point (p. 174). See also SB Engelthal, 4, 33–34.

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speaks of the s­ isters as united with God, sometimes so closely as to suggest no distinction between them.135 One might suppose ­these passages are referring to the undivided apophatic deity. But when a ­sister prayed “that she and God would be one ­thing” and that he might dwell in her soul more than in the tabernacle, and when a voice told her that if she ­were as empty of all temporal ­things as the tabernacle is of all ­things except himself, he would dwell as genuinely in her as in it, the obvious point is that Christ dwells in the tabernacle.136 In practical terms, the relationship between Christ’s humanity and his divinity is reflected in the relationship between devotion and contemplation. In princi­ple, contemplation leads or is directed t­oward the ineffable, apophatic divinity, while devotion can be focused on the incarnate and historical figure of Jesus in whom both divine and ­human natures are manifested. This distinction rests in part on Neoplatonic notions of contemplation taken over into Christian tradition, but it is not uniformly borne out; t­ here are mystical writers who in vari­ous ways find a place for Christ and even his humanity within contemplative prayer.137 The commonplace theme in ­later medieval piety was that one gains access to the divinity through the humanity, meaning that devotion leads upward ­toward contemplation.138 In the sister-­books, however, devotion and contemplation are sometimes combined in unexpected ways. The sister-­book from Unterlinden in Colmar contains passages bearing variously on this subject. Mechtild of Wincenheim saw Jesus as an incomparably beautiful ­little boy r­ unning about the altar and playing, but she was so rapt in contemplation that she was unable to note or delight much in this vision.139 For her, devotional and contemplative experience w ­ ere so distinct that the one kept her from the other. In the case of Adelheid of Rheinfelden they are more closely linked: she was praying, suddenly she was raised into ecstasy, in her contemplation she beheld the highest of truths, had a foretaste of heavenly joy, and was made aware of heavenly secrets, with a supercelestial vision of divinity; then she beheld the Lord in his most divine humanity, more comely 135. ​SB Adelhausen, 154–55, 156–67, 174, 180, 182. Anne of Ramschwag from Katharinental was sitting in her stall in the choir of her monastery when it seemed to her that her body opened up so that she looked into her self and saw two beautiful ­children embracing each other, of whom one was the Lord, and the other was her soul, which showed how she and God w ­ ere united. Christ might take the form of a child, but a divine child with whom she was in ­union (SB Katharintntal, 131). 136. ​SB Adelhausen, 161. 137. ​See especially Paul Mommaers, The Riddle of Christian Mystical Experience: The Role of the Humanity of Jesus (Leuven: Peeters, 2003). 138. ​See the sources cited in Henry Suso, The Exemplar, ed. Nicholas Heller, trans. S­ ister M. Ann Edward (Dubuque, IO: Priory Press, 1962), 2:358, n9. For one formulation, see Amy Hollywood, The Soul as Virgin Wife: Mechthild of Magdeburg, Marguerite Porete, and Meister Eckhart (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995), 7, 54. 139. ​SB Unterlinden, 367–68.

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than the sons of men, tender as a newborn infant, crying before her, but glowing with a beauty that transcended h ­ uman nature.140 In this account t­ here is no distinction: a vision of the child Christ is embedded within a contemplative, unitive experience, and ­there is no sense that focus on Christ’s humanity was a distraction from the “supercelestial” beholding of divinity. In the case of Herburg of Herenkeim, we find the two sorts of experience occurring one ­after the other, but it is the devotional apparition of humanity that serves as the terminus and has lasting effect. She was once rapt in spirit all night; the heavens ­were opened to her, and she beheld the glory of the Lord unveiled.141 When at last she returned to herself, she went out to perform her duties at the portal of the monastery, but ­there the Virgin appeared to her three times with the child in her arms, causing Herburg to be overwhelmed with devotion and joy, and even when the vision was taken away from her eyes, her mind was from then on lastingly fixed on God.142 When t­ hese s­ isters of Unterlinden wend their way along the paths of contemplation and devotion, is the contemplation as well as the devotion directed specifically to Christ in his divinity? Bernard of Clairvaux had proposed that carnal affection for the humanity of Christ leads a person t­ oward rational and then spiritual love for his divinity.143 ­Were ­these ­sisters in vari­ous ways captivated by the lower stages in the ascent? On that point the sister-­book is not clear, but depiction of the humanity itself as glorious or divinized facilitates the transition upward: turning from the humanity of Christ ­either to his own divinity or to that of the indistinct deity would be all the easier ­because his divinity was already disclosed along with his humanity. One of the most revealing passages from the sister-­books tells of a nun of Katharinental who has a vision of a round globe of pure fire, in which Christ appears to her as a child, then as a man of thirty years, then as a fiery flame. He says to her, “I was a ­little child, and I am the age-­old God you attend to in all ­things.”144 This is a striking version of transtemporality. It is almost as if Christ is showing her a movie of his life on earth: the Christ shown in the vision is the incarnate and historical Christ whose ­human nature is clearly manifest, and even the shift from one age to another emphasizes his h ­ uman capacity to age, but the Christ who shows the vision is the eternal and ubiquitously 140. ​SB Unterlinden, 403–04. 141. ​The phrase “reuelata facie” alludes to II Corinthians 3:18 and to the hymn “Adoro te devote.” 142. ​SB Unterlinden, 390. 143. ​Bernard of Clairvaux, Song of Songs, 1, sermon 20, 1:147–55. 144. ​SB Katharinental, 131 (“Jch was ein kleines kindli vnd bin der alt got, den du meinest in allen sachen”); Lewis, By ­Women, for W ­ omen, about W ­ omen, 95. Lewis translates meinest as “love,” which is indeed one pos­si­ble meaning of meinen in late medieval usage, but “intend” or “attend to” prob­ably captures the sense ­here.

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pre­sent divine person who stands outside time, appears at one moment in time (the life of the nun), and can point backward to another moment (his historical life). And yet he is the same divine person, both the one who shows the vision and the one shown. Even in heaven, the person of Christ can be revealed in ­either his humanity or his divinity. Diemut Ebnerin had a vision of Christ enthroned in heaven, his five wounds shining forth over all the heavenly host, “and t­here was no greater joy in heaven than from his wounds,” but he foretold that l­ater she would see him in the mirror of his divinity. In a subsequent vision, then, she beheld him in dazzling brightness, with fiery rays blazing from him, brighter than the stars, and three rays ­were especially noteworthy. T ­ hese, he let her know, represented the souls that he sent out from his divinity into the bodies of three p­ eople with whom he willed to do ­g reat won­ders, and she was one of ­these.145 On a Platonic reading ­these would be preexistent souls awaiting embodiment; on a more plausible Neoplatonic interpretation they are the archetypes of individuals eternally pre­sent in the divine mind. But Christ is the same person who in heaven appears first in his humanity, then promises to appear l­ater in his divinity. An extended passage from the entry on Jützi Schulthasin from Töss is of special interest for its subtle shifting from language about “God” to language clearly referring to Christ. ­Sister Jüzi perceived how God is in all creatures, and nothing can be achieved u ­ nless God’s presence is t­ here: God is in e­ very blade of grass and in ­every ­little flower and leaf, and all around us and in us. She came close to God and desired g­ reat and overwhelming ­favors from him, but then she heard a voice saying, “How do you know ­whether God has called you to that?” Now terrified, she came to despise herself utterly and thought herself worthy only of the depth of hell. She resigned herself to remain eternally ­there, being so entirely united with God that she willed nothing but what God willed. Then at mass she heard a voice inwardly once again, with a message clarifying what had been said e­ arlier, and explaining that he (the speaker) and the ­Father ­were one in ­will and love, before he made ­humans or himself became a man, and that she should likewise become one in w ­ ill and love with him. This brought her to a constant indwelling with God and united her ­will with his. She understood that in heaven we ­will have him, God and man, as genuinely as we receive him now from the hands of the priest. Not long afterward she had a vision of God as he is in heaven, God and man, beholding him up to his breast.146 Much of this passage uses language that mystics would typically use for the undivided deity: when she refers to di145. ​SB Engelthal, 33–34. 146. ​SB Töss, 72–73, 78.

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vine ubiquity and to her ­union of ­will with God, she sounds as if she is speaking of God simpliciter. But when a divine voice comes to her on two occasions, the speaker refers to himself in relationship with the F ­ ather, claims a role in creation, and speaks of his own incarnation, making clear that this is the voice of Christ the Word. When she speaks of receiving “God and man” in communion or seeing a half-­length figure of “God as he is in heaven, God and man,” again she is speaking of Christ. It is pos­si­ble that she shifts from speaking of the undivided deity to speaking of Christ, but the shift is not explicit or particularly clear. What we can say is that the terms are so blurred b­ ecause when she refers to Christ, she is so focused on his divinity that ­there is no clear difference between Christ and the indistinct deity. Language about “God” meshes seamlessly with language about Christ.147 The fourteenth-­century German w ­ omen relevant to this study w ­ ere largely Dominican nuns, but not all. T ­ oward the end of the f­ ourteenth c­ entury, a lay ­woman of Prus­sia, Dorothea of Montau (1347–1394), took the theologian Johannes Marienwerder as confessor and told him in ­g reat detail about her experience of Christ’s presence and communication. She entered into an anchorhold not long before her death and continued ­under Marienwerder’s solicitous and exacting care. In the vari­ous accounts of her life that Marien­ werder wrote, her spiritual interlocutor is almost always “the Lord,” and t­ here are long stretches in which it might almost seem as if she is in communion with God the F ­ ather, or simply God without distinction of persons, but then she speaks of him as “Lord Jesus,” or he refers to his m ­ other or to an event in his earthly life, making clear that it is specifically Christ who has been speaking all along. On occasion he identifies himself as “your God,” but again in context it is clearly Christ who is speaking.148 Also on occasion Marienwerder’s German life of Dorothea speaks of “God” where the Latin life refers to “the Lord.”149 Calling Christ “God” is certainly not a specifically vernacular habit, but when writing in Latin, Marienwerder the theologian might have preferred the title “Lord” b­ ecause “God,” while not incorrect, might have seemed to fall short of the precision to which Latin more often aspired. Christ was God, to be sure, but in a language that was used for more precise expression, it might have seemed more natu­ral to call him the Son of God, the Word of God, the 147. ​SB Töss, 69–79. 148. ​See VDM 1.1.d (“Lord Jesus”), 1.4.e (“Lord Jesus”), 1.8.f. (“O Jesus Christ, Son of the living God”), 1.8.h (“my dear M ­ other”); 4.10.c (“me Deum,” but then receiving him sacramentally), 4.11.e (“me, your God”); 4.24.e (“Christum Dominum unicum dilectum”), 4.33.k (reference to Transfiguration), 4.34.c (with his ­mother). 149. ​Compare LDM 1.17 (Stargardt, 49), with VDM 2.24; LDM 2.16 (Stargardt, 102), with VDM 3.14.a–­b, p. 131; LDM 2.29 (Stargardt, 129), with VDM 1.2.f, p. 33; LDM 3.1 (Stargardt, 147), with VDM 5.3.a, pp. 214–15.

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second person of the Trinity, or God incarnate—or ­else to evade this call for exactitude by falling back on the term “Lord.” When Dorothea experienced the presence of Christ, the attributes shown most clearly w ­ ere not ­those of incarnate and suffering humanity but t­ hose of omnipotent and majestic divinity, even if a highly par­tic­u­lar and localized manifestation. Christ revealed himself to Dorothea in such splendor that all creation seemed to her merely nothing, except for being filled with the divine majesty. He said to her, “I am almighty, an im­mense good, broad and spacious, which no one can perfectly comprehend nor totally encompass, nor can anyone enjoy me perfectly, nor is t­ here any who can perfectly express and tell of my ­g reat goodness.”150 That it is Christ who speaks is clear when he reminds her how, as a child, he sat on Saint Christopher’s shoulder.151 Again, he came to her within her cell, seeming to fill the space and her soul with his omnipotence, and everywhere she turned he was t­ here in that omnipotence. Even when the text speaks of Christ as appearing in his divinity and his humanity, it generally speaks of the divinity as his “omnipotence”: Christ is said to appear in his omnipotence and his humanity,152 to which his childhood and his eucharistic presence may be added with no recognition of an abrupt shift.153 One passing remark in Marienwerder’s account makes clear that devotion to the humanity of Christ is inferior to recognition of his divinity but less challenging. Christ himself, referring to his resurrection, comments that few ­people want him to appear to them inwardly with all his omnipotence, but many desire intensely that he appear to them amid bodily delights and pleasures and in the form of a pilgrim and gardener.154 Dealing with his humanity, or confronting him in recognizably ­human form, may be more comfortable, but divinity is power. The f­ourteenth c­ entury was, as already mentioned, a time of flourishing devotionalism, and Germany was where some of the most striking forms of devotion to the sufferings of Christ—­the Man of Sorrows and the Pietà, along with meditations on Christ’s Passion—­emerged or became common. The figures dealt with ­here lived in the midst of this devotional culture, and (as we ­shall see in a l­ater chapter) they decidedly shared in it, yet they maintained a lively sense that the person of Christ was the eternal Word and that when he 150. ​VDM 4.20.k, p. 181. 151. ​Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints, trans. William Granger Ryan (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1993), 2:12. 152. ​LdF c. 22, p. 42. 153. ​LdF c. 22, pp. 42–43; cf. c. 25, p. 48. 154. ​LdF c. 58, p. 95; cf. “Jesus Christ creator of heaven and earth,” c. 74, p. 125. The references to a pilgrim and gardener allude to Luke 24:13–32 and John 20:15.

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came to them it was with all the power and knowledge of divinity. To some extent t­ here may have been tension between t­ hese themes. It would be misleading to say that the divinity won out over the humanity of Christ in t­ hese texts, but it would be apt to say that the humanity was always contextualized by a divinity with which it was joined and even fused, a divinity that preceded the humanity, and a divinity that made exceptional ­favors pos­si­ble.

Margery Kempe The untitled book of Margery Kempe (ca. 1373–­after 1438), discovered in 1934, has become a neo-­canonical work, celebrated as the earliest autobiography in En­glish. Kempe was a lay w ­ oman whose ­father was a merchant and mayor of the town of Lynn. Following the birth of her first child (out of at least fourteen), she entered a period of depression and temptation, and in response to that she experienced the presence and reassurance of Christ. If her book had a title, it might well be her “Book of Friends and Enemies,” absorbed as it is on the one hand with her quest for consolation and understanding from sympathetic friends, especially from Christ, and on the other with the vicious assault on her by demons and ­human adversaries.155 It gives a wealth of magisterial discourse and in­ter­est­ing references to transtemporality. Kempe had such deep affection for the humanity of Christ that scenes from everyday life could call the incarnate Christ to her mind. If she saw a male baby carried in his m ­ other’s arms she would weep as though she had seen the child Christ, and if she saw a handsome man she would look at him carefully in hopes of seeing Christ.156 Yet when she encountered Christ as a real presence and an interlocutor, she thought of him emphatically and insistently as divine. As we have already seen, he identifies himself to her as the one who died on the cross but then as “the same God” who caused her to confess her sins and who forgave her. Even when referring to his crucifixion, he refers to himself 155. ​On Kempe, see Cla­ris­sa W. Atkinson, Mystic and Pilgrim: The Book and the World of Margery Kempe (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983); Lynn Staley, Margery Kempe’s Dissenting Fictions (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994); Anthony Goodman, Margery Kempe and Her World (London: Longman, 2002); John H. Arnold and Katherine J. Lewis, eds., A Companion to the Book of Margery Kempe (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2004); Liz Herbert McAvoy, Authority and the Female Body in the Writings of Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2004); Naoë Kukita Yoshikawa, Margery Kempe’s Meditations: The Context of Medieval Devotional Lit­er­a­tures, Liturgy and Iconography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); and Rebecca Krug, Margery Kempe and the Lonely Reader (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2017). 156. ​BMK 1.35; Mary Dzon, “Margery Kempe’s Ravishment into the Childhood of Christ,” Mediaevalia 27 (2006): 27–57.

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as “God.” At one point she exclaims, “Lord God, you know all ­things.” She prays, “my dearest Lord and my God, do not forsake me.” That he is omnipotent is a condition of her reassurance, and so she cries out to “Almighty God, Christ Jesus.” She is praised for believing firmly that it is God who speaks in her soul. He tells her he loves her with all the power of his divinity. He identifies himself as the spirit of God, who w ­ ill help her in her e­ very need. He urges her to believe it is God who speaks in her, and that God is in her and she in him. She can have no other comfort than Christ, her God. It is as the almighty God that he c­ auses her to weep.157 He tells her, “I proceed with the might of my divinity,” and a note in the margin calls attention to this proclamation of the potestas divina.158 Other p­ eople referred to Kempe as a w ­ oman who spoke with “God” and to whom “God” spoke.159 Passages that indicate God is speaking to her usually make clear that this means Christ, although sometimes, exceptionally, it is all three persons of the Trinity who speak to her soul.160 Even when it is Christ, he identifies himself more explic­itly as God than as man, while she refers to him as God or, more typically, “Lord.”161 The interchangeability of “God” and “Lord,” and the significance of such address, can be seen in one complicated exchange. Kempe complained to the “Lord” that he had forsaken her. An angel assured her “God” had not forsaken her but was punishing her b­ ecause she feared it was not “God” who spoke to her. She then asked the angel to pray to “my Lord Jesus Christ” and said she would promise “God” that she would believe it is “God” who spoke to her. The angel said “my Lord Jesus” would continue her suffering so she could know ­whether it was better that “God” or the Devil speak to her, but “my Lord Christ Jesus” was never the angrier with her. When the time of penalty was over, she resumed having conversation with “our Lord Jesus Christ,” and he said she should believe he was no dev­il; she acknowledged that “­every good thought is the speech of God”—­and then she addressed him five times as “Lord.”162 The title “Lord” is inherently relational: one person is lord over another. If Kempe 157. ​BMK 1.11, 1.32, 1.45, 1.87. 1.13, 1.30, 1.35, 1.37, 1.65. 158. ​BMK 1.77 (“divinity” substituted for “Godhead”). 159. ​BMK 1.12 (“I her seyn God spekyth on-to þe”) and 1.29 (“þe ­woman of Inglond þe which þei had herd seyd spak wyth God”). 160. ​BMK 1.17. 161. ​It was “our Lord” who recalled to her his Passion, in BMK, 1.14 (Windeatt, 65–67) and 1.63 (Windeatt, 195–96) and spoke to or about “his blessed m ­ other” in BMK, 1.21 (Windeatt, 84–86) and 1.74 (Windeatt, 216). In a discourse ascribed to “our Lord Jesus Christ” he referred to himself as “Almighty God” in BMK, 1.65 (Windeatt, 198–200). Elsewhere in dialogue with “our Lord” she addressed him as “blissful Jesus” in BMK, 2.3 (Windeatt, 273–74). 162. ​BMK 1.59 (Windeatt, 184–85). See Rebecca Krug, “Jesus’ Voice: Dialogue and Late Medieval Readers,” in Form and Reform: Reading Across the Fifteenth ­Century, ed. Shannon Gayk and Kathleen Tonry (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2011), 127–28.

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inclines to refer to Christ as Lord, this is at least partly ­because she is acknowledging his status vis-­à-­vis her. The designation “God” is not in the same way inherently relational; one can of course speak of “my God,” but divinity is an intrinsic status, and when one speaks of “God,” his relations with creatures are secondary to his being in himself. If Christ tends to assert his divinity, referring to himself as “God,” he is telling Kempe something about himself that has implications for her chiefly b­ ecause as creature she must acknowledge his supremacy. In this passage, however, the divinity of Christ is the grounding for his absolute truthfulness and trustworthiness, and Kempe is asked to submit to the assertion of Christ’s inherent qualities, which is why ­here both terms are used interchangeably, recognizing both the inherent status that Christ claims and the implications that Kempe must acknowledge. The reason for a focus on divinity is in Kempe’s case reasonably clear. More than anything e­ lse (as we s­ hall see l­ ater) she needs reassurance, and it is Christ as God who can provide that. A focus on the divinity is the basis for ascribing to Christ the power and ubiquitous presence that she is meant to find and does find reassuring. She needs assurance of his forgiveness, his ­favor, and his protection. When she pleads with him not to forsake her, this is for her not simply a topos; she has been abandoned by mortals and cannot abide the notion of Christ failing her. His assurance that he ­will provide for her ­every need is again not simply conventional; she was a needy soul. He has a character informed both by the gospels and by traditions of mystical attachment: he is unfailingly compassionate, he has suffered for her sake, and he becomes her mystical lover. None of the deeds and attributes of the incarnate Christ that ­were the usual allurements to love is h ­ ere diminished. But the person who on earth was si­mul­ta­neously divine and h ­ uman is now recognized as f­ree from the limitations of time and space. To call him “divine” is not to say that he is not also h ­ uman, but rather to emphasize that he is not bound to the particularities of time and place as a historical person must be. He can come to her at any time and support her unfailingly b­ ecause he is now freed from the bonds of time and thus open to all time. Having entered into history once, he can do so again, presenting to Margery and to ­others not just the person he is in eternity but the personality he has established in time. The transtemporal presence of Christ is fundamental for Kempe. Intimate contact with divinity could be terrifying at times as well as reassuring, and Christ told Kempe he had “chastised” her with the fear of his divinity. In the end, however, he led her to feel affection for that same divinity.163 In one remarkable passage Margery displays profound discomfort when faced 163. ​BMK 1.22, 1.85.

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with the prospect of relating intimately to divinity. This is her reluctant mystical marriage not to the Son but to the ­Father.164 She was in the church of the Holy Apostles at Rome when the F ­ ather spoke to her, saying he was pleased with her b­ ecause she believed in all the sacraments and in the humanity of his Son and felt compassion for his Passion. Then the F ­ ather said he wished her to be wedded to his divinity, and they would live together eternally, and he would reveal many mysteries to her. To this stunning proposal she said nothing. She was unfamiliar with and even afraid of the divinity, “for all her love and affection w ­ ere fixed on the manhood of Christ, and of that she did have knowledge and would not be parted from that for anything.” Her silence was evidently awkward. Christ intervened, asking what response she would give, but even so she could not answer. The Son asked the ­Father to excuse her ­because she was young and inexperienced. So the ­Father took her by the hand before the court of heaven and recited an adaptation of the marriage vow, taking her for his wedded wife, “for fairer, for fouler, for richer, for poorer,” provided only she followed his commands meekly. Then Mary and the saints prayed that they would have g­ reat joy together. Why was Kempe ultimately so comfortable with the divinity of the Son but not of the F ­ ather? And why does the text say h ­ ere that all her devotion is to Christ’s humanity, when elsewhere t­ here is such strong emphasis on his divinity? Two explanations pre­sent themselves, and prob­ably both are correct. One is that when she is confronted with the marriage proposal, it is not God the ­Father who gives her discomfort but rather God the ­Father, not the deity but the patriarch. The notion of being the bride of Christ, the ideal lover, was not problematic, and indeed just a­ fter her marriage to the F ­ ather, the Son tells her that he (the Son) and she must be intimate together in bed, where she may embrace him with the arms of her soul.165 But being married to an old man, reminiscent more of her ­human ­father than of an ideal lover, was unthinkable.166 Just as impor­tant, but subtler, was the fact that Christ combined the best of both natures in a single person: his h ­ uman nature gave him a personality that was easily imaginable, attractive, and reassuring (her focus in this passage), while his divine nature gave him the accessibility and the power to be her comforter and protector (her concern elsewhere). The ­Father had unalloyed divine nature that was harder for her to bear. 164. ​BMK 1.35. 165. ​BMK 1.36 (Windeatt, 126). 166. ​On the implications of her relations with her biological f­ather, see Barbara Newman, God and the Goddesses: Vision, Poetry, and Belief in the ­Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 280, n114.

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She distinguished at one point between two phases of her life. In the first phase, beginning shortly ­after her conversion, she had visions of Christ’s historical life and Passion; he seemed physically close to her, as if she could touch his toes. She found that through such visions “her affection was entirely drawn into the manhood of Christ and into the memory of his Passion.” Then in the second phase, which began ­after she made a vow of chastity and went on pilgrimage to Rome and Jerusalem (and thus a­ fter the disturbing mystical marriage to God the F ­ ather), Christ gave her “understanding of his incomprehensible divinity” and “affection [for] his divinity,” which was “more fervent in love and desire, and more subtle in understanding, than was the manhood.”167 What is new ­here? Much ­earlier in the book and in her life it had been routine for Christ to speak of himself clearly and explic­itly as divine, and for her to address him as Lord in contexts that make clear that this title also implied divinity.168 Nor is it the case that ­earlier she gives only nominal assent to his divinity and ­later comes to recognize its real­ity and implications. To the contrary, all along his divine power and divine ubiquity have been explicit and of vital concern to her understanding; she has accepted not only the divine person but the divine nature of Christ. If t­ here was a shift, it is perhaps best signaled by the terms “incomprehensible” (  [in]vndirstondabyl ) and “subtle” (sotyl ). Even though the first term is corrected in the manuscript from its opposite, the context makes clear that in the second phase she is more keenly aware of the apophatic dimension of divinity. This development echoes at least faintly the transition Bernard of Clairvaux describes from carnal to rational and then spiritual love of Christ. She does not say that she had previously been unaware of or inattentive to Christ’s divinity; she says, rather, it was the humanity that drew her affection. All along she had recognized him as an all-­powerful and ubiquitous divinity, and that divinity was what made it pos­si­ble for him to transcend time and become pre­sent to her manifested in his lovable humanity. If ­there is a new development in the second phase, it is that the divinity she had previously recognized was now, more than the humanity, what she found alluring and lovable, and perhaps alluring and thus lovable b­ ecause she now saw it as subtle and beyond her understanding.169 And this suggests a further reason, prob­ably the most impor­tant, for the disparity between her constant recognition of Christ’s divinity and her distress at being married to God the ­Father: she honored and valued the divinity of Christ, but at that point it was not what 167. ​BMK 1.85 (Windeatt, 249–50). 168. ​BMK 1.5 and 1.11–15. 169. ​See Voaden, God’s Words, W ­ omen’s Voices, 138–39, for a differently inflected reading of the passage.

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held her affection, and being put in a position to hold the non-­incarnate divinity of God the ­Father was simply unthinkable. The wording that is explicit for Kempe has relevance to o ­ thers as well, some of whom may have been more directly familiar with Bernard’s formulation, that affection for the humanity of Christ leads on to absorption in the divinity. Any of the figures we have discussed for whom the divinity of Christ’s person was centrally impor­tant—­figures who addressed Christ as God, who recognized him as eternally divine and accessible throughout time b­ ecause of his eternal divinity, and who saw his divine power and knowledge as necessary for the role he played for them—­might have said along with Kempe that it was his h ­ uman nature and his suffering that captured their affection and might have found it a mea­sure of spiritual pro­g ress if, again like Kempe, and again following Bernard’s paradigm, they found their affection l­ ater drawn from his humanity to his mysterious and alluring divinity. ­There is far more involved ­here than simply a ­later medieval devotion to the humanity of Christ, although that is an ele­ment in this complex of piety. To some extent Kempe modeled herself on the courtly figure Birgitta of Sweden (ca. 1303–1373).170 Yet Birgitta’s experience of Christ differed from Margery’s in crucial ways, even though for both of them the divinity of Christ was of paramount significance.171 Whereas Kempe is often a troubled soul needing comfort, especially from Christ, Birgitta of Sweden pre­sents herself confidently as a prophet with a message to convey, and the image of Christ that emerges from their revelations is proportional to the roles they play. The Christ who manifested himself to Birgitta was a source not primarily of reassurance but of bracing prophetic critique. His tone with her in the recorded revelations was usually dogmatic and imperious rather than reassuring. He declaimed extended monologues. He identified himself as divine, emphasizing not so much his attribute of ubiquity that makes him accessible to a soul in prayer, but rather his role as creator that distinguishes him fundamentally from all creatures.172 One of her visions is prefaced by an exclamation giving honor 170. ​She was aware of Birgitta’s revelations and cited the highly abridged M ­ iddle En­glish version of Birgitta’s encounters with Christ and Mary. Christ once told Kempe that he spoke with her as he had to Birgitta, and he assured her that ­every word in Birgitta’s book was true. When she was in Rome, she met with Birgitta’s former maid and even visited the chamber in which Birgitta had died. See BMK 1.20 (Windeatt, 83–84); 1.39 (Windeatt, 132). 171. ​Birgitta of Sweden, Life and Selected Revelations, ed. Marguerite Tjader Harris, trans. Albert Ryle Kezel (New York and Mahwah: Paulist, 1990). 172. ​He was creator of the universe, as “the unchanging and eternal God, your Creator” who “came down from heaven to a Virgin and took flesh from her and lived with you” (Birgitta, Life and Selected Revelations, 7.30, pp.  216–17), “the Creator and Redeemer of all” (7.4.1–16, pp.  161–63; cf. 7.9, p. 171; 7.11.1–22, pp. 173–75; 7.16.12–15, p. 192; 7.27, pp. 207–11). On Birgitta, see James Hogg, ed., Studies in St. Birgitta and the Brigittine Order (Salzburg: Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 1993); Bridget

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to the triune God “in his power and everlasting majesty,” who was pleased that “his most worthy humanity” should speak to her in prayer.173 At times Birgitta was taken up into heaven and beheld Christ on his celestial throne, or transported to “a ­grand palace like the serene sky,” where “as it ­were, the person of a ­human being, a Lord of incomprehensible beauty and im­mense power,” was enthroned in splendid vesture.174 Even when speaking of Christ’s humanity, Birgitta emphasized his divine splendor.

Divinity and the Child Christ The previous chapter and this one have complicated and challenged received wisdom about l­ater medieval emphasis on the humanity of Christ. Nowhere is the prob­lem more clear than in discussion of the child Christ, in contexts where Christ becomes transtemporally manifest as he was in his infancy. One might expect the child to be unambiguously ­human, but instead what comes to the fore is the paradox of a Christ who engages in magisterial discourse, makes autotheological proclamations, and other­wise manifests divine qualities even when they might be least expected. Popu­lar repre­sen­ta­tion of the child Christ was grounded ultimately in the apocryphal infancy gospels of late antiquity, in par­tic­ul­ar the infancy gospels of Pseudo-­Thomas and Pseudo-­Matthew, in which the young Jesus can be disruptive and unruly while at the same time exercising authority conceived as divine.175 He challenges the authority of his teacher. If playmates offend him, he strikes them dead. The gospel of Pseudo-­Matthew has Jesus claiming, “do not think that I am a child; for I have always been and even now am perfect.”176 In ­Middle En­glish versions of ­these apocryphal infancy gospels, the playmates Morris, St Birgitta of Sweden (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 1999); Claire L. Sahlin, Birgitta of Sweden and the Voice of Prophecy (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2001); Anette Creutzburg, Die heilige Birgitta von Schweden: Bildliche Darstellungen und theologische Kontroversen im Vorfeld ihrer Kanonisation (1373–1391) (Kiel: Ludwig, 2011); Fabian Wolf, Die Weihnachtsvision der Birgitta von Schweden: Bildkunst und Imagination im Wechselspiel (Regensburg: Schnell & Steiner, 2018); and Nancy Bradley Warren, The Embodied Word: Female Spiritualities, Contested Orthodoxies, and En­glish Religious Cultures, 1350–1700 (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010), esp. 16–31, 44–97. 173. ​Birgitta, Life and Selected Revelations, 7.20.1–2, p. 200. 174. ​Birgitta, Life and Selected Revelations, 7.2, p. 160; 7.30, pp. 216–17; 7.19, pp. 196–99. 175. ​“Infancy Gospel of Thomas,” cc. 6, 9–10, and 17, in Ronald F. Hock, ed., The Infancy Gospels of James and Thomas, with Introduction, Notes, and Original Text Featuring the New Scholars Version Translation (Santa Rosa, CA: Polebridge, 1995), 112–15,122–27, 136–39. The lit­er­a­ture on ­these texts is rich, but one might begin with Stephen J. Davis, Christ Child: Cultural Memories of a Young Jesus (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014). 176. ​Wilhelm Schneemelcher, ed., New Testament Apocrypha, rev. ed., trans. R. McL. Wilson (Cambridge: James Clarke, 1991), 1:462.

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and even the parents of the young Jesus sometimes address him as “Lord,” and a drawing that accompanies t­hese legends in one manuscript shows Jesus crowned and enthroned, with other c­hildren kneeling rev­er­ent­ly before him.177 It has been suggested that for late medieval readers the unruly be­hav­ ior of the young Jesus would have seemed to experiment with the notion of a presently active potentia absoluta of God, an absolute power that pertains not only to what God could theoretically have done before ordaining the norms of law and salvation, but to God’s capacity to disrupt normal norms and patterns.178 The narratives w ­ ere of long standing, and their late medieval formulation would not necessarily have called to mind the notion of God’s potentia absoluta, but a reader who knew this theology might have appealed to it to make sense of this portrayal of a transgressively divine Jesus. In late medieval sources the child Christ is often playful. He may play in the nuns’ choir stalls, sit on their books, sing with them (or with his ­mother), and play a “sweet game of love” with them.179 This aspect of his character should not be taken for granted. The texts taken as highlighting the humanity of Christ tend to focus mainly if not exclusively on his suffering. A truly ­human Christ should be shown taking comfort in affectionate physical contact, finding delight in sensory experience, perhaps the taste of wine or the feel of a fresh breeze, enjoying physical vigor and rest, and in general showing the full range of capacities that mark one as ­human. Late medieval commentary often seems to reduce Christ’s h ­ uman nature to passibility. But not always: the playfulness of the child Christ at least shows a more rounded ­human personality. And yet the playfulness of the child Christ is not always and necessarily a mark of humanity, b­ ecause Christ as God may also be playful. He told Christina Ebner, “I play a game with you in my divinity,” and he played with her even “before the beginning.”180 This is the language of Christ as Eternal Wisdom playing before the F ­ ather, and presumably also before the saints and angels and perhaps even the eternal archetypes of ­those yet unborn. In the Book of Proverbs (8:30–31), Wisdom declares, “I was with Him, forming all t­ hings, and each day I took delight, playing before Him throughout all time [ludens coram eo omni tempore], playing on the globe of the world [ludens in globo terrarum].” 177. ​Mary Dzon, The Quest for the Christ Child in the ­Later ­Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), 20 (drawing on p. 19). 178. ​Julie Nelson Couch, “Misbehaving God: The Case of the Christ Child in MS Laud Misc. 108 ‘Infancy of Jesus Christ,’ ” in Mindful Spirit in Late Medieval Lit­er­a­ture, ed. Bonnie Wheeler (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 31–43. 179. ​For example, VCH c. 5 (trans., 6); c. 6, p. 7; c. 34, pp. 40–41. 180. ​Hindsley, The Mystics of Engelthal, 162.

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Romano Guardini took this biblical passage as reflecting the same sense of sheer delight, not purpose-­driven, that he saw in the liturgy as well.181 It is the delight that a child may find in play, a child whose simplicity gives entry to the kingdom of God, and when Christ speaks of himself as playing with Christina Ebner in his divinity, he elides the distinction between child’s play and divine play. The child Christ is also, in some ­later medieval texts, manifestly omniscient, and this quality posed a serious theological challenge. Margaret Ebner held dialogue with the infant in the form of question and answer. She asked about the circumstances of his birth, how Joseph wrapped him up, w ­ hether he grabbed the hair of one of the magi (yes, he did), what became of the gifts from the magi (his ­mother passed them along to the poor), and so forth. But she also inquired about the fate ­after death of certain individuals, including the emperor.182 The infancy and childhood of Christ pre­sent in a particularly acute form the prob­lem of defining the kinds of knowledge possessed by Christ incarnate. Simply by taking on a body, Christ could become subject to hunger and thirst, suffering and death; ordinary h ­ uman privations could readily be granted to what he experienced by virtue of his specifically h ­ uman nature. But if the divinity and humanity ­were joined in a single person, could that person be in any way ignorant without compromising his divinity? And contrariwise, how could he be omniscient without compromising his humanity? Albert the ­Great distinguished four types of knowledge that Christ had: as a wayfarer on earth, as a “comprehender” (one with comprehensive knowledge), as God, and as a ­human. As God, he knew every­thing by a s­ imple act of knowledge. But even as ­human being united with God, he was able to contemplate all t­ hings in the divine Word.183 The prob­lem with such distinctions is that if the humanity and divinity of Christ ­were joined in a single person, it became difficult to explain how he can know something in one mode but not know it in another. This remained a disputed issue for ­later Scholastics, perhaps most famously Bonaventure.184 For Bonaventure, h ­ uman knowledge is derived from contact 181. ​Romano Guardini, “The Playfulness of the Liturgy,” from The Spirit of the Liturgy, trans. Ada Lane (1930; New York: Herder & Herder, 1998), 61–70. 182. ​ME pp.  139–40, 164–66. Barbara Koch, “Margaret Ebner,” in Medieval Holy W ­ omen in the Christian Tradition, c. 1100–­c. 1500, ed. Alastair Minnis and Rosalynn Voaden (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010), 401 (on Ebner’s use of crucifixes) and 403 (on her statue of the child Christ). 183. ​Walter Senner, “Christ in the Writings of the Rhineland Dominicans,” in Christ Among the Medieval Dominicans: Repre­sen­ta­tions of Christ in the Texts and Images of the Order of Preachers, ed. Kent Emery and Joseph Peter Wawrykow (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1998), 394. 184. ​Saint Bonaventure, Disputed Questions on the Knowledge of Christ, ed. Zachary Hayes (Saint Bonaventure, NY: Franciscan Institute, 1992). See Kevin Madigan, The Passions of Christ in High-­Medieval Thought: An Essay on Christological Development (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 23–50, for aspects of this prob­lem.

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with the unstable realities of the world and can become certain only when it is informed by the “eternal reasons” that underlie empirical objects. Fully immutable truth can be seen only by “­those who are able to enter into that innermost silence of the soul,” to which only “one who is supremely a lover of eternity” can attain, which is of course true of Christ. Even in his h ­ uman soul, then, Christ knows comprehensively all that has happened, is happening, or ­will happen, and in that ­human soul he is drawn ­toward the fuller knowledge of what God could do and know, without possessing that knowledge in the same way that he knows what does in fact come about.185 If it was difficult to explain how the adult Christ could be both ­human and omniscient, it was all the more challenging to imagine how omniscience could be reconciled with his infancy and childhood. At one point, Mechthild of Magdeburg had a revelation of the infant Christ lying in the manger on hard straw; she interceded for t­hose who had asked her prayer, and in response the child spoke without moving his mouth, saying, “I have nothing to give them but myself and eternal life.”186 This is a striking case of Christ as a child demonstrating extraordinary wisdom. The motif of the preternaturally wise child, the puer senex, is found in hagiography and elsewhere,187 and t­ hese apparitions of the infant or child Christ build on that tradition, but with the further understanding that the child in the manger is, ­after all, the eternal Word made incarnate. Mechthild of Hackeborn pondered the implications of this paradox: She also recognized how the fullness of the w ­ hole Divinity dwelt in such a tiny l­ittle baby, and how the almighty power of God fortified that ­little body lest it be utterly shattered; and how the unsearchable wisdom of God lay hidden in him, for his wisdom was as ­great when he lay in the manger as it is now when he reigns in heaven; and how all the sweetness and love of the Holy Spirit w ­ ere infused into that tiny infant.188 Christ himself told Dorothea of Montau that when he lay in the manger he knew well how to talk and could have done so, if he had wished to do miracles, but he preferred not to do so.189 As he lay in his ­mother’s lap, he appeared to be omnipotent, ruling and governing all t­ hings, and bearing himself 185. ​Joshua C. Benson, “Structure and Meaning in St. Bonaventure’s Quaestiones disputatae de scientia Christi,” Franciscan Studies 62 (2004): 67–90 (esp. 75–76, 79); Therese Scarpelli, “Bonaventure’s Christocentric Epistemology: Christ’s ­Human Knowledge as the Epitome of Illumination in De scientia Christi,” Franciscan Studies 65 (2007): 63–86; Andreas Speer, “The Certainty and Scope of Knowledge: Bonaventure’s Disputed Questions on the Knowledge of Christ,” Medieval Philosophy and Theology 3 (1993): 35–61. 186. ​FLG 7.60, pp. 650–51 (Tobin, 329). 187. ​Teresa Carp, “Puer-­senex in Roman and Medieval Thought,” Latomus 39 (1980): 736–39. 188. ​LSG 1.5 (Newman, 45–46). 189. ​LdF c. 12, p. 27.

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as if all ­things in heaven and on earth ­were his, with omniscience and eternal wisdom; he appeared small in humanity but im­mense in the divinity that inhabited his humanity.190 His manifestation to the three magi or kings was chiefly in the mode of divinity: burning with love of God, they paid him the cult of latria or worship, and his radiant deity shone through the transparent ­human body in which it dwelled.191 The Virgin reported to Dorothea that her son showed ­little of ­human weakness, except at his circumcision.192 The theme of Christ’s preternatural wisdom even in youth recurs in the sister-­books.193 Christ came to Margaretha of Rosenstein as a child of about twelve years and declared in Latin, “Ego sum pontifex futurorum bonorum.”194 It was at the age of twelve that Christ instructed the teachers in the ­Temple (Luke 2:39–52), which makes that an appropriate for him to display preternatural wisdom, although he presumably did not speak Latin in the ­Temple.195 An echo of that story is prob­ably intended in the anecdote about a prioress at Katharinental who was accompanied by the child Christ, who taught her every­ thing she should say in the chapter h ­ ouse.196 That he is often a young boy rather than a baby is consonant with repre­sen­ta­tions in art: the Virgin seldom holds a child who appears exactly newborn. Even if he is the newly born babe in the manger, however, he is the infans effans, supernaturally able to speak.197 Occasionally the ­sisters recognize the child only from the extraordinary ­things he says about himself. When it is lay s­ isters who fail at first to recognize him, they are perhaps being shown as naïve. Elsbet Schefflin of Töss sat in the choir a­ fter compline when a wondrous and lovable child came through the choir and approached her. She asked, “O, my dear child, who are you?” He replied, “I and the Trinity are one t­hing, and as much as that is true, so also is it true that you w ­ ill never be separated from me.”198 A lay ­sister of Engelthal was at prayer in the refectory, and a beautiful l­ittle child ran round about her. She said, “Dear child, do you have a m ­ other?” He said, “Yes.” “Do you have a ­father?” He said, “Yes, my f­ather is eternal.” She said, “So you are our Lord

190. ​LdF c. 26, pp. 49–50; part of ending lacking in one manuscript, and some textual irregularity. 191. ​LdF c. 26, p. 50; c. 27, pp. 51–52. 192. ​LdF c. 22, p. 42. 193. ​The remainder of this section for the most part appeared in an ­earlier version in my chapter on “Ihesus ist unser!: The Christ Child in the German ­Sister Books,” in The Christ Child in Medieval Culture: Alpha es et O!, ed. Mary Dzon and Theresa M. Kenney (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012), 167–98. 194. ​SB Gotteszell, 139. 195. ​See, for example, the life of Ida of Nivelles, in Cowley, Send Me God, c. 19b, pp. 58–59. 196. ​SB Katharinental, 97. 197. ​SB Katharinental, 97. 198. ​SB Töss, 24.

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Jesus Christ!” Then he dis­appeared.199 Similarly, a lay s­ ister of Unterlinden was serving at the portal of the monastery when she saw a lovely l­ittle boy standing by himself. She asked, “Dear l­ittle boy, where are you from? And who are your ­father and your m ­ other?” He answered, “Pater Noster himself is my f­ ather, and Ave Maria is my m ­ other.” Then again he dis­appeared.200 Adelheit of Hiltegarthausen at Gotteszell once had occasion to babysit the child Christ. She was reading in her psalter, and the child began reading along. She asked what he was reading, and he replied, “I am reading verbum dei.” He read further, and she asked what he was reading, to which he replied, “I am reading how I was born of my ­Father.” He continued, and again she asked what he was reading; this time he said, “I am reading how I was born of my ­mother.” She then commented on his fine locks of hair; the child grabbed his head, saying, “I d­ idn’t have hair in eternity!” Omniscience is fused h ­ ere with a kind of charming naïveté. The child is capable of delighted surprise even while remembering what he, the Word and Understanding of God, has known all along.201 ­These texts may seem simplistic in representing even the child Christ as clearly divine, but they are grappling with the same issue that all our sources confront and often discuss in more overtly sophisticated ways: how to recognize that the person of the incarnate Christ is the eternal Word, eternally divine, and never divested of divine powers in his incarnate life. The lower Christology of modern popu­lar thinking may prefer to emphasize Christ’s kenosis, his emptying-­out of the form of divinity in his incarnation, a notion grounded in Philippians 2:7. But that is not the only Christology found in the New Testament, and in the classical theology of the fourth and fifth centuries a higher Christology prevailed. That classical Christology is what we find with fair consistency in our late medieval sources. For medieval as for early Christian writers, Christology is driven largely by soteriology: Christ is as he is ­because he needs to save. Redemption required a God-­man whose ­human nature enabled him to submit to suffering and death, but that he be in any way ignorant was not required for salvation, and if the theologians had difficulty accounting for an incarnate yet omniscient savior, this difficulty did not undermine their Christology. For the late medieval sources we are discussing, Christology was driven also by the further practical concern that Christ must be accessible ­here and now, available to hear and respond to prayer, pre­sent and capable of manifesting his presence. 199. ​SB Engelthal, 40, 39; cf. 32. 200. ​SB Unterlinden, 408. 201. ​SB Gotteszell, 125.

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Conclusion The figures we are discussing h ­ ere all spoke of Christ as literally pre­sent and ­really communicating with them. That should not be surprising. ­Others of their age, committed to their religion but less striking in their manifestation of that commitment, shared with them a belief that Christ was ubiquitously pre­sent and able to hear and answer prayer. But if someone believes such t­ hings occur, and has experienced them occurring, how does that person tell o ­ thers about the experience? Clearly the telling w ­ ill be influenced by conventions found within the culture for narrating religious experience, which means that to some extent the narrative ­will be pre-­scripted. Choices ­will be guided by a decision about how to tell a story that makes a theological point without disquisition becoming interruption to the story itself. Even the decision to tell the experience in the first place w ­ ill make a difference: p­ eople want the stories they tell to be engaging and to make an impact, and when they are stories about their own experience they are means of self-­representation. Even if one believes in the princi­ple that Christ can hear and answer anyone’s prayer, telling a story about one’s own experience of that happening w ­ ill tend to suggest that t­ here is something special about the one making the disclosure. And even when narrative strategies are deployed for speaking about Christ, the explicit focus on him and his person and natures w ­ ill allow the teller to share in the splendor of Christophany. The more the speaker has to say, the less ordinary she seems. All the narrative strategies sketched above appear in the sources discussed, but not with uniform frequency. Magisterial discourse and declarations of autotheology occur most often, to the point of being almost routine in this lit­ er­at­ ure. The other themes—­transtemporality, blending of contemplative and devotional language, and Christ’s divinized humanity—­are found widely but more selectively. Taken together, this set of strategies serves to define an approach to Christ and to Christophany characteristic of the era’s religious lit­er­a­ture.

C h a p te r   3

Presupposition, Intuition, and Perception

Felix Vernet, whose book on medieval spirituality appeared in 1929, proposed that the phrase “Jesus said to me,” as it was used by many writers, manifestly “only applies to pious thoughts arising in the mind during prayer.” Drawing on Vernet, Mary Jeremy Finnegan suggested that the dialogues Gertrude of Helfta and ­others had with Christ at least sometimes “are not to be taken as ­actual, literal conversations.”1 This way of viewing dialogue with Christ may seem to reduce the exceptional to the ordinary, making Christophany into psy­chol­ogy. One might expect that ­those who claimed to converse with Christ would resist this interpretation. ­There are passages, however, in which medieval subjects come close to speaking in the same apparently naturalizing way. Margery Kempe said that “­every good thought is the speech of God.”2 Adelheid Langmann (1306–1375) spoke of herself addressing a question to Christ and receiving an answer “in her thoughts.”3 Did ­these ­women mean to imply that divine communication is 1. ​Felix Vernet, Mediæval Spirituality, trans. Benedictines of Talacre (St. Louis: Herder, 1930), 220. Vernet refers in this sentence to “numberless modern autobiogaphies and spiritual diaries,” but he has just been speaking of Hadewijch, and he goes on to say that “Suso is not the only writer who must often be understood in this way.” Mary Jeremy Finnegan, The ­Women of Helfta: Scholars and Mystics (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991), 96. 2. ​BMK 1.59 (Windeatt, 185). 3. ​Philipp Strauch, ed., Die Offenbarungen der Adelheid Langmann, Klosterfrau zu Engelthal (Strasbourg: Trübner, 1878), 3 (“do antwurt ir unser herre irn gedanken”); cf. SB Katharinental, 104–5. 88



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mediated through thoughts that might be difficult to distinguish or disentangle from ordinary ­human reflection? Did they actually hear Christ speaking to them, or did they merely have an intuition of what he would say? Did they perhaps not distinguish rigorously between ­these possibilities? Even if Vernet is correct, and even if Christophany can be explained as arising out of prayer and meditation, late medieval pious Christians might respond (indeed, as we s­ hall see in chapter 10, they actually did respond) that this does not bring the exceptional down to the level of the ordinary, but raises the ordinary to the dignity of the exceptional. When exceptional and ordinary experience are assimilated to each other, the effect is not to reduce the momentousness of the extraordinary but to heighten the momentousness of the ordinary. If ­there is continuity between dramatic manifestation of presence and less momentous glimpses of that same presence, the point from a late medieval perspective is a reminder that ordinary life is never merely ordinary. It may be useful ­here to think of a spectrum of possibilities: Christ’s presence can be presupposed, intuited, or perceived. This spectrum is fluid and ­interdependent. Presupposition shades into intuition, and intuition into perception. The weaker claims of indirect discourse can become transformed in recollection and report into the stronger claims of direct discourse. “I had a sense that Christ was urging me to go on pilgrimage” becomes “Christ told me to go on pilgrimage,” and then “Christ said to me, ‘Go on pilgrimage.’ ” The presupposition of presence lends plausibility to claims of both intuition and perception: the claim to have sensed or perceived Christ’s presence is more persuasive if it is agreed in advance that he is in fact pre­sent. Experience then reinforces the presupposition: if t­here are p­ eople who persuasively claim to have sensed, heard, perhaps even seen Christ, that confirms and makes more vivid what one has accepted all along, that Christ as God is always and everywhere pre­sent.4 Presupposition is a form of faith, expected of all. Perception is granted to the few and may even be taken as a sign of sainthood. Intuition is the nebulous m ­ iddle term that links the first and third. This schema of presupposition to intuition and then to perception is obviously a simplification, but one that helps bring into focus certain themes found in the late medieval texts. In some cases, vision narratives are—­and may even be explic­itly acknowledged as—­literary constructions meant for edification or education. Even then, the narratives are modeled on other visions that are represented as a­ ctual occurrences, and at times they may reflect something like the transition from 4. ​The fluidity is effectively suggested by Michelle Karnes, “Julian of Norwich’s Art of Interpretation,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 42 (2012): 339, in a paraphrase of Julian: “Christ is always to be sought, even in a cloudy vision. The act of perceiving Christ where he is not visibly pre­sent is paradoxically what makes him vis­i­ble.”

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presupposition to intuition and perception. Das Buch von dem Diener (The Life of the Servant), based on the experience of Henry Suso but admittedly in part pious fiction, tells of a series of “consolations” he is supposed to have experienced, and they pro­gress from a kind of inner melodic prayer that presupposes the divine presence, to an awareness of ­music that he “heard somehow within him,” and then to a succession of visions represented as clearly super­natural.5 Suso does not label the progression in terms of three clearly distinct phases, but one would not expect that, precisely b­ ecause the transitions are fluid and not clearly bounded. It bears repeating that we are dealing ­here with texts of highly diverse character, some Latin and o ­ thers vernacular, some largely autobiographical, some hagiographic, mostly in some sense lit­er­a­ture of revelation. When differences in genre or language are relevant to the analy­sis, they ­will (as has already been said) be part of the analy­sis. We cannot expect anything like a cohesive model of spiritual or psychological pro­cess to emerge from ­these diverse texts. What we can do is trace certain fundamental questions about the ways Christ’s presence is experienced, questions that arise and are variously answered across texts of widely varying character. If late medieval religious culture has any sort of coherence, it comes more from shared issues than from agreed upon solutions. In chapters 1 and 2, reading of texts was done with the grain of t­ hose texts: the authors and subjects discussed ­were themselves concerned in vari­ous ways to accentuate and interpret the divinity of Christ. Readings in the pre­sent chapter proceed to some extent against the grain of the texts, which tend to emphasize that their subjects perceived Christ’s presence, w ­ hether in locution or in vision. That is the basic purpose of the lit­er­a­ture of revelation, and the miraculous nature of the perception is if anything more forcefully clear in related hagiography. If the texts give evidence of a shift from presupposition to intuition and then perception, they do so subtly, with cues requiring interpretation that must always be in some mea­sure tentative. Still, ­these suggestions are frequent enough that in the aggregate they make a plausible case, showing that late medieval Christians ­were capable of seeing a spectrum of experience corresponding to our model. The main purpose of this entire book is to explore both the differences and the connections between ordinary and exceptional religion, and that purpose is more at the forefront of this chapter than of most. Presupposition of Christ’s presence is ordinary, while perception of that presence is exceptional, but the broad and complex field of intuition cannot so easily be assigned to ­either cat5. ​ The Life of the Servant, 1.5, in Henry Suso, The Exemplar, with Two German Sermons, trans. and ed. Frank Tobin (New York: Paulist, 1989), 71–74.



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egory. In the end, figures who seem to be entirely exceptional emerge as still exceptional yet sharing more with ordinary Christians than might at first have been clear.6

From Presupposition to Intuition That the presence of Christ could be taken for granted—­and that this assumption could be part of an ordinary life of Christian piety—is illustrated already by a scene from the life of the En­glish recluse Christina of Markyate (ca. 1097–ca. 1155). When Christina was a girl, she heard it said of Christ that he was good, handsome, and pre­sent everywhere, so she would talk to him as she lay in bed at night, “just as if she w ­ ere speaking to a man she could see.” She addressed him out loud, thinking that when she spoke to God, she was in a sort of auditory ­bubble and other ­humans would not hear her. But ­those around her did hear, and they made fun of her, so she changed her manner of speaking, presumably more quiet if not in fact s­ ilent.7 What is most extraordinary about this story is precisely its ordinariness. While we have abundant rec­ords of extraordinary, mystical experience of Christ, ­there is much less surviving evidence of how ­people learned of and responded to his ubiquitous presence. This is, then, a relatively rare survival. The suggestion that Christ is pre­sent everywhere is of course a theological commonplace, and t­here is nothing exceptional about its having been told to Christina in her childhood. Nor is t­here any reason to think it was transmitted to her by anyone of exceptional piety. It is the sort of counsel any moderately pious Christian might have given to any child. When Christina spoke to Christ at night, surely neither she nor her contemporaries would have said that his presence itself was make-­believe: the text does not say she spoke as 6. ​Jessica Barr, Intimate Reading: Textual Encounters in Medieval ­Women’s Visions and Vitae (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2020), 21, distinguishes between writings that create “an interpretive distance between the reader and the saintly subject” and t­ hose that enable readers “to imagine themselves in an intimate communion” with the subject. Barr’s formulation is complementary to my own. If ­there are texts that encourage a sharing in the subject’s experience, I suggest this is largely ­because that experience is portrayed as being in continuity with generally accessible experience. 7. ​C. H. Talbot, ed. and trans., The Life of Christina of Markyate, a Twelfth C ­ entury Recluse (Oxford: Clarendon, 1959), 36–37: “audierat de Christo quod bonus est, quod pulcher, quod ubique presens; quasi ad hominem quem videret.” For comment on this and other instances Christina of Markyate’s experience of Christ, see Neil Cartlidge, “The Unknown Pilgrim: Drama and Romance in the Life of Christina of Markyate,” in Christina of Markyate: A Twelfth-­Century Holy ­Woman, ed. Samuel Fanous and Henrietta Leyser (London: Routledge, 2005), 79–98; C. Stephen Jaeger, “The Loves of Christina of Markyate,” in Christina of Markyate: A Twelfth-­Century Holy W ­ oman, ed. Samuel Fanous and Henrietta Leyser (London: Routledge, 2005), especially 107–8, 111–12; and Thomas Head, “The Marriages of Christina of Markyate,” in Christina of Markyate: A Twelfth-­Century Holy ­Woman, ed. Samuel Fanous and Henrietta Leyser (London: Routledge, 2005), 116–37.

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if he ­were ­there, but as though he w ­ ere pre­sent in vis­i­ble form. That he was in fact ­there spiritually was not in dispute.8 If she was naïve, this was not b­ ecause she addressed Christ as pre­sent, but ­because she had not yet learned the conventions of how to address him quietly or silently in prayer. It was precisely ­because he was more intimately pre­sent to her than another interlocutor and was able to read her thoughts that normal communication seemed unnecessary and naïve. What she learned was a s­imple but impor­tant lesson: to communicate with Christ, you ­don’t have to shout. Among Christians in late medieval society, every­one might be expected to accept at least nominally the notion that Christ, being divine, was ubiquitous. He did not need to become pre­sent; he was always and everywhere already pre­sent.9 When Christina of Markyate heard that Christ is pre­sent everywhere, or when Margery Kempe assumed that Christ is everywhere pre­ sent,10 they w ­ ere giving voice to a commonplace assumption. Again, Christ came once to Friedrich Sunder of Engelthal (1254–1328) while he was eating, and Sunder asked why he had come; Christ answered that he was actually with him at all times and in all places, along with the angels.11 ­Because Christ was ubiquitous, he could be assumed pre­sent not only when he was imparting a revelation to someone but when that revelation was shared and read: he told one nun of Helfta that he was in the mouth of one speaking a revelation and in the hand of one writing it, and another that he was with the reader of her revelations, as if the book ­were in his own hands.12 To be sure, this ubiquitous presence might at times seem counterintuitive. When Mechthild of Hackeborn was too ill to attend mass, and complained that she was so far from God, Christ replied, “Wherever you are, I am.” He went on to say that when someone is prevented from participating in the liturgy by illness or obedience or some other reasonable cause, “Wherever a person is, I am pre­sent ­there and with him.”13 8. ​For a dif­fer­ent reading, see Steven Justice, “Did the ­Middle Ages Believe in Their Miracles?,” Repre­sen­ta­tions 103 (Summer 2008): 20. 9. ​St. Augustine, The Literal Meaning of Genesis, 12.34.66, in The Works of Saint Augustine, pt. 1, vol. 13, trans. Edmund Hill (Hyde Park, NY: New City, 1990), 504: “There is nowhere . . . where Christ is not present, since he is himself the Wisdom of God, reaching everywhere . . . (Wis 7:24).” 10. ​BMK 1.54. 11. ​“Das Gnaden-­Leben des Friedrich Sunder, Klosterkaplan zu Engelthal,” in Siegfried Ringler, Viten-­und Offenbarungsliteratur in Frauenklöstern des Mittelalters (Munich: Artemis, 1980), 436–37. 12. ​Anna Harrison, “ ‘Oh! What Trea­sure Is in This Book?’: Writing, Reading, and Community at the Monastery of Helfta,” Viator 39 (2008): 88 and 101–2, from LSG 5.32, p. 354, and LDP 5.32, pp. 354– 55 (Barratt, 143–47); Anna Harrison, “Thousands and Thousands of Lovers”: Sense of Community among the Nuns of Helfta (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press/Cistercian Publications, 2022), 24 and 54; Margarete Hubrath, Schreiben und Erinnern: Zur “memoria” im Liber specialis gratiae Mechthilds von Hakeborn (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1996), 54. 13. ​LSG 3.19, p. 221 (Newman, 155–56); cf. LSG 4.45, p. 301 (Newman, 184–85).



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Metaphysical ubiquity and personal accessibility ­were not distinct: if Christ was everywhere, he could in princi­ple be addressed as pre­sent. Constance of Rabastens (d. 1386) spoke to Christ, saying, “Lord, I know that the true God is in heaven and on earth and everywhere. Wherever I may be, you ­will be t­ here too.”14 A noblewoman of the Upper Rhine, Gertrude Rickeldey (d. 1335), urged her friends to draw their hearts to him, become familiar with him, imploring and “caressing” him, for he is “always available for us.”15 Somewhat ­later, but expressing an enduring commonplace assumption, Desiderius Erasmus (1466– 1536) assured a correspondent that Christ the bridegroom of pious souls was pre­sent to each of them more than any other spouse could be.16 ­Because he was presupposed pre­sent, one could pray to him, aloud or silently, with assurance that he would hear the prayer, and it would not be out of the ordinary to assume that he answered the prayer in one way or other: he might give reassurance, he might chastise, he might provide guidance or inspiration. Christina Ebner was confident that Christ would respond to her prayers and even to her thoughts.17 Thus prayer involved not only addressing God but hearing him.18 Normally ­these responses would be implicit and taken on faith. T ­ hose who ­were particularly devout might, more than other ­people, have moments when this presence was not merely presupposed but intuited. When they prayed, they might have a sense, however vague or precise, however fleeting or lasting, that their prayer was in fact heard and responded to. They might report feeling moments or phases of consolation, 14. ​Renate Blumenfeld-­Kosinski and Bruce L. Venarde, ed. and trans., Two ­Women of the ­Great Schism: “The Revelations” of Constance de Rabastens by Raymond de Sabanac and “Life of the Blessed Ursulina of Parma” by Simone Zanacchi (Toronto: Center for Reformation and Re­nais­sance Studies, 2010), 47, no. 26. 15. ​Anneke B. Mulder-­Bakker, The Dedicated Spiritual Life of Upper Rhine Noble ­Women: A Study and Translation of a Fourteenth-­Century Spiritual Biography of Gertrude Rickeldey of Ortenberg and Heilke of Staufenberg (Turnhout: Brepols, 2017), c. 9, pp. 143–44. 16. ​Erasmus to Catherine of Aragon, March 1, 1528, in Des. Erasmus Roterodamus, Opus epistolarum, ed. P. S. Allen and H. M. Allen (Oxford: Clarendon, 1928), 7:339. 17. ​Leonard Patrick Hindsley, The Mystics of Engelthal: Writings from a Medieval Monastery (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 1998), 75. 18. ​­These are commonplace assumptions, but see, e.g., Bonaventure, “The Life of St. Francis,” 12.1, in The Soul’s Journey into God, The Tree of Life, The Life of St. Francis, trans. Ewert Cousins (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist, 1978), 292: “In prayer we address God, listen to him and dwell among the angels”; Paul Mommaers, The Riddle of Christian Mystical Experience: The Role of the Humanity of Jesus (Leuven: Peeters, 2003), 147; and Friar Johannes O. P. of Magdeburg, “The Life of Margaret the Lame,” trans. Gertrud Jaron Lewis and Tilman Lewis, in Living Saints of the Thirteenth C ­ entury: The Lives of Yvette, Anchoress of Huy; Juliana of Cornillon, Author of the Corpus Christi Feast; and Margaret the Lame, Anchoress of Magdeburg, ed. Anneke B. Mulder-­Bakker (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011), 325: “Confidence in prayer should be so strong that, when asking something of God in prayer, we should be immediately certain and believe without doubt or wavering that Jesus Christ truly hears us. . . . ​For the most faithful granter of every­thing, Jesus Christ, who has already heard us praying, ­will grant it to us at whichever time he knows to be best.”

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reassurance, or inspiration, which they ascribed to Christ’s presence and influence. When Ida of Nivelles had a pious thought, her hagiographer construed it as a “whisper” from Christ; she spoke to Christ “in the silence of her thoughts,” he responded “to her thought,” and again she would speak “within her heart” for only the two of them to hear.19 What does “intuition” mean in this context? Intuition was a crucial concept in the epistemology of Duns Scotus (ca. 1266–1308) and William of Ockham (1287–1347). For the most part, however, they used the term in ways that do not have obvious relevance to the indistinct awareness of spiritual p­ resence. Scotus distinguished between intuitive cognition, which entailed knowledge of something existing and pre­sent h ­ ere and now, and abstractive cognition, which focuses on what something means regardless of its existence or presence. In his ­earlier work he spoke of intuitive cognition only in the context of the beatific vision in heaven. He ­later used the concept for angels’ knowledge of God, Christ’s own h ­ uman knowledge, knowledge that one has of one’s own ­mental pro­cesses, and other forms of cognition, but he was not attempting to define the sort of intuition that a h ­ uman during life on earth might have of a spiritual presence, and it is not clear how his notion of intuition would apply in that context. Ockham took the concept over, made it more central to his thought, and applied it somewhat differently. For him it was an epistemological category pertaining to ordinary h ­ uman experience and specifically to the knowledge that leads to “evident judgment” regarding contingent m ­ atters. The contingent facts of ordinary experience are known in a way that allows us to make straightforward and secure judgments about them, and knowledge of that sort is what Ockham called intuitive. While Scotus tended to speak of intuition in a way that sidestepped the specific issue we are dealing with, Ockham used it with reference to cognition generally without attending to this specific issue. In some contexts, however, Ockham clarified the term in a way that arguably points t­ oward the sort of intuition we are speaking of: intuitive cognition is the initial step t­ oward formation of a concept; it involves immediate formation of a concept regarding the t­ hing intuited, prior to activity of the intellect that then gives further specification to our understanding of that object.20 19. ​Martinus Cowley, trans., Send Me God: The Lives of Ida the Compassionate of Nivelles, Nun of La Ramée, Arnulf, Lay B ­ rother of Villers, and Abundus, Monk of Villers, by Goswin of Bossut (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003), c. 1g, p. 32; c. 21d, p. 64. 20. ​Marilyn McCord Adams and Allan  S. Wolter, “Memory and Intuition: A Focal Debate in ­Fourteenth ­Century Cognitive Psy­chol­ogy,” Franciscan Studies 53 (1993): 175–92; Allan B. Wolter, “Duns Scotus on Intuition, Memory and Our Knowledge of Individuals,” in History of Philosophy in the Making: A Symposium of Essays to Honor Professor James D. Collins, ed. Linus J. Thro (Washington, DC: University Press of Amer­i­ca, 1982), 81–103; Stephen D. Dumont, “Theology as a Science and Duns Scotus’s Dis-



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In the nature of t­ hings, intuition as we are dealing with it h ­ ere could be hard to define in precise terms. Intuition tends to be elusive, sometimes dreamlike, possibly even perceived in a dream or a half-­waking state,21 perhaps like an impression glimpsed in the corner of the eye. Even so, it could produce a strong conviction that something real had happened. A person who prayed or meditated might say of Christ or any spirit, “I could neither see nor hear him, I only sensed him.”22 Bernard of Clairvaux captured the elusive quality of intuition when he spoke of Christ the Word as coming to him: he was not aware of the moment of coming or ­going, but knew he had been visited from the effect that remained with him.23 Even more clearly, Teresa of Ávila (1515–1582) strug­gled to convey her intuitive sense of presence: I saw or, to put it better, I felt Christ beside me; I saw nothing with my bodily eyes or with my soul, but it seemed to me that Christ was at my side—­I saw that it was He, in my opinion, who was speaking to me. . . . ​ It seemed to me that Jesus Christ was always pre­sent at my side; but since this w ­ asn’t an imaginative vision, I d­ idn’t see any form. Yet I felt very clearly that He was always pre­sent at my right side and that He was the witness of every­thing I did. . . . ​I immediately went very anxiously to my confessor to tell him. He asked me in what form I saw Him. I answered that I d­ idn’t see Him. He asked how I knew that it was Christ. I answered that I ­didn’t know how, but that I c­ouldn’t help knowing that He was beside me, that I saw and felt Him clearly.24 If we want an analogue to this in a late medieval text, the life of Gertrude Rickeldey provides one. Gertrude said to her companion about Christ’s manifestation to her, “I can tell you not even a single word except that I know well that our Lord is pre­sent to the soul. But how he is pre­sent to the soul and in what manner, I cannot tell anyone. At that time the soul is in such sweetness and immea­sur­able joy that if it ­were allowed to wish for the heavenly tinction between Intuitive and Abstractive Cognition,” Speculum 64 (1989): 579–99; T. K. Scott, “Ockham on Evidence, Necessity, and Intuition,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 7 (1969): 27–49. 21. ​For a dream manifestation, see ME pp. 90, 91, 94–45; cf. SB Töss, 38. 22. ​Claire Fanger, Rewriting Magic: An Exegesis of the Visionary Autobiography of a Fourteenth-­ Century French Monk (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2015), 27. In this case the spirit sensed but not perceived was the Holy Spirit. 23. ​Bernard of Clairvaux, Song of Songs, 3, Sermon 74.2.5–7, trans. Irene Edmonds (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1979), 4:89–92. 24. ​St. Teresa of Avila, “The Book of Her Life,” 27.2–3, in The Collected Works, trans. Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodriguez (Washington, DC: Institute of Carmelite Studies, 1976), 1:174; Mommaers, The Riddle of Christian Mystical Experience, 78.

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kingdom I could not wish for a better heavenly kingdom. . . . ​But when it passes, the person has forgotten every­thing and cannot say anything more about it than about a dream.”25 At times it is not clear ­whether a text of this sort is speaking of intuition or of ineffable revelation; both had the quality of being difficult to grasp and convey, lacking the specificity of ­either aural or visual perception. Gertrude of Helfta prayed for another w ­ oman, and Christ told her he had been waiting for the time when he could lead that w ­ oman into the solitude of infirmity, where he could speak to her heart and not to her ear, saying ­things to her that cannot be understood in a ­human manner, for “­those ­things that are said to the heart are more sensed than heard.”26 One might suppose it was a liability to be ill and not have the capacity for ordinary communication, but h ­ ere the more intuitive exchange that is sensed and not grasped in a normal way is an exceptional f­avor, and Christ has been anticipating the occasion for its bestowal. ­These texts do not say that t­ here was a clear perception that cannot or may not be transmitted; they suggest, rather, that the apprehension even at the time of the experience was indistinct, however forceful the sense of a presence. Teresa and both Gertrudes seem to speak of experiences that have the borderline, indeterminate quality of intuition rather than perception. Now and again Mechthild of Hackeborn suggests in passing that she has received a divine message with the force of intuition. It “came to her mind” that God had once said something to her, or that she should judge herself harshly.27 In such passages it is not the revelation itself but its recollection or reconsideration that has the force of intuitive insight. But when Christ tells her that “­every desire for me that anyone has ever had has been inspired by me,”28 the implication is that even an urge that seems autonomous can turn out on closer examination to be divine in origin, which again means that the voice of conscience or of reflection may contain the divine voice within it.

From Intuition to Perception In more dramatic cases, a person might report that Christ’s presence was not simply presupposed or intuited but actually perceived, that one had heard his 25. ​Mulder-­Bakker, The Dedicated Spiritual Life, c. 17, p. 183. 26. ​LDP 5.1.4, pp. 30–33 (Barratt, 8) (“magis sentiuntur quam audiantur”). 27. ​LSG 1.19, pp. 68–69 (Newman, 82) (“incidit menti ejus”); 1.46, p. 131. 28. ​LSG 2.14, p. 148 (Newman, 127–28) (“omne desiderium quod unquam aliquis ad me habuit, a me inspiratum est illi”).



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voice or even seen him. Communication with Christ might result in dialogue that could be reported and recorded. He might appear as a young child, perhaps with his ­mother, or as the suffering Man of Sorrows, or simply the way one ­imagined him in his incarnate life. Locutions might be more frequent than visions.29 In some cases the sources convey a fairly clear distinction between sensing the presence of Christ (without locution or vision) and perceiving that presence (with locution and perhaps also vision), and the former is often spoken of as a m ­ atter of feeling, sensing, or what we might call intuition, but this distinction is not always clearly defined. Angela of Foligno knew the full range of modes in which she could experience Christ’s presence, from presupposition to intuition to perception. She shared with the Spiritual Francisans a keen sensitivity to Christ’s ubiquitous presence.30 ­There ­were times when she saw Christ and heard him speak. But many of the crucial passages of her Memorial incline more ­toward the language of intuition or feeling, using the verb sentire and the noun sentimentum, which could arguably convey something of the ambiguity found in the vernacular sentire, which can mean e­ ither “hear” or “feel.” Angela’s intuition was chiefly a sensing of Christ’s presence within her soul. She prayed for a sense of Christ’s presence.31 She was assured that she would always “feel something of God’s presence.” She felt that God was in her (“anima tunc sentiebat Deum esse in se”), as indicated by delight she experienced from his presence. She felt Christ in her when his love set her soul ablaze. On receiving communion, too, she had an indescribable sense of divine presence.32 Elsewhere Angela distinguishes a succession of ways the divine presence is revealed, and in the first four stages of her schema we can see something closely akin to the transition from presupposition to intuition and then perception.33 First, the soul takes delight in grace and believes the experience comes from God, but is not directly aware of God’s presence. Second, God’s presence is manifested through mysterious divine words and through the effect of divine fire and love within the soul. Third, God himself engenders within the soul a 29. ​Peter Dinzelbacher, Vision und Visionsliteratur im Mittelalter (Stuttgart: Hiersemann, 1981), 163–64, points out that for many late medieval figures the language of vision is relatively incidental: the overwhelming emphasis is not on what they saw but on what they heard. 30. ​Stephen Mossman, Marquard von Lindau and the Challenges of Religious Life in Late Medieval Germany: The Passion, the Eucharist, the Virgin Mary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 83, 88–89. 31. ​AF Memoriale, c. 3, ed. p. 178 (Lachance, 139) (“quod ipse rogaret Deum pro ea ut ipsa sentiret de Christo”). 32. ​AF Memoriale, c. 4, p.  206 (“habui inenarrabile sentimentum Dei”) (Lachance, 150); c. 4, ed. p. 224 (Lachance, 157; c. 4, pp. 226–27 (Lachance, 158); c. 6, p. 272 (Lachance, 174). Further examples: c. 4 (Lachance, 149 and 151–52); c. 6 (Lachance, 176); c. 7 (Lachance, 188); c. 7 (Lachance, 188–89). 33. ​AF Memorial, c. 7, pp. 312–24 (Lachance, 187–92).

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desire for God, and recognition of that urging gives a sense of God merging with the soul and becoming its companion. In the fourth mode, God instructs the soul to look at him, and then “the soul sees him taking shape within itself as it sees him more clearly than a person can see another person.”34 The main difference between this schema and the one we are using is that for Angela ­these are stages in spiritual progression that the soul may be expected to follow. She would presumably not admit that they can at least sometimes represent dif­fer­ent ways of remembering and reporting experiences. Other w ­ omen also spoke of dif­fer­ent ways presence could be manifested or experienced. The prologue to Gertrude of Helfta’s Herald distinguishes between a general or habitual presence of Christ and a more specialized manifestation that could more easily be communicated to ­others. Gertrude “constantly enjoyed the presence of the divine generosity,” but sometimes she experienced more than this: “he appeared,” or “the Lord was with her,” coming to her “in a form more amenable to the imagination,” in a way that could be communicated to ­others.35 Margaret Ebner speaks in two sharply distinct ways about the presence of Christ, sometimes relatively unspecific and even abstract, at other times clearly specific and concrete. Often she speaks of perceiving the divine presence within her, sometimes saying God is sensibly pre­sent in her soul.36 When she perceives God’s presence, every­thing becomes delightful for her, and she is sure (like the psalmist) that even in hell that presence could not be taken from her.37 She sometimes senses the divine presence ­after communion, or Christ tells her that he, her Lord and God, w ­ ill be pre­sent when she receives 38 him sacramentally. Her devotion to the name of Jesus may lead her to awareness of the divine presence.39 She becomes aware of the presence of God and of “the Truth, who is the Lord Himself,” who speaks to her, saying he has given himself to her and lives and works in her, he alone, “your Lord and your God and your only Love,” and she should rejoice that “the true God” lives in her.40 Even when she senses that she is in the presence of the suffering Christ, or of the God who bore suffering and death on the cross, she can say that without conveying a strong sense of his appearance.41 It is not always clear in such pas34. ​The fifth through seventh ways seem less sharply defined and less clearly correlated with the schema proposed ­here. Cf. AF Memoriale, c. 3, p. 188 (Lachance, 143) (“videbant me oculis corporis et non sentiebant istud quod tu sentis, et tu non me vides et sentis me”); c. 4, p. 204 (Lachance, 149). 35. ​LDP, general prologue, para. 6 (Barratt, 33–34). 36. ​ME pp. 69, 93 (Hindsley, 122, 135–36). 37. ​ME p. 43 (Hindsley, 108). Cf. Psalm 139:8 (138:8 in the Vulgate). 38. ​ME pp. 85, 89, 97, 141 (Hindsley, 131, 133, 138, 161–62). 39. ​ME p. 15 (Hindsley, 93). 40. ​ME pp. 140–41 (Hindsley, 161). 41. ​ME pp. 52, 92–93 (Hindsley, 113, 135).



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sages that the presence is specifically that of Christ, although that is usually the implication. Such sense of presence is a source of delight but not usually of revelation or even dialogue. On other occasions, however, she refers to the presence not just of Christ but of Christ as a child, and on t­hose occasions she reports ample engagement with a personality and sometimes extended dialogue. The more clearly intuition moves in the direction of perception, the more specific the identity and manifestation of the divine presence. Revelation came to Dorothea of Montau by inspiration and by locution; she “found and sensed” many ­things within herself by Christ’s ordination, and this language again recalls the fluid relationship between intuition and perception.42 And for Dorothea, again, Christ’s presence was virtually a constant ­factor that seems to have been in­de­pen­dent of perception and perhaps preceded it. The realization of presence was the primary datum revealed: what­ever ­else he conveyed to her, the primary message was that he was intimately pre­sent to her. One is at times reminded of the gospel of John, in which Christ reveals many par­tic­u­lar teachings but mainly reveals himself as the one through whom the ­Father can be seen.43 Her soul was so firmly bound to Christ that being without his presence was impossible for her.44 “I myself am your life, working and living within you.”45 For Dorothea presence did not always entail manifestation, but manifestation was of personal presence: Christ appeared to her as pre­sent, and not as simply the image of a being remote from her.46 He might be at hand without manifestation: she should never suppose she was alone, b­ ecause he was pre­sent to her along with his ­mother and a multitude of saints.47 He told her he was pre­sent not in only one manner but in several. The precise mode of presence might be unclear: she enjoyed such delight in Christ’s presence that she was unable to distinguish clearly the modes of his presence or his working in her soul.48 Christ’s divine nature was never in doubt, and ­because of it, his presence could have an expansive quality: the entire space around her, and indeed the entire world, seemed filled with Christ.49 Her hagiographer comments that in general terms God is everywhere by virtue of his essence, his presence, and his power, yet he is in certain places in an exceptional way, and

42. ​LdF c. 55, p. 89 (“nunc inspiratione, nunc allocutione”); LdF c. 59, p. 96 (“invenit et sensit”). 43. ​The “I am” sayings of John 6:35 and 41, 8:12 and 9:5, 10:7 and 9, 10:11 and 14, 11:25, 14:6, and 15:1 and 5 are particularly relevant ­here. 44. ​VDM 5.10.f, p. 228. 45. ​VDM 2.19.b, p. 81. 46. ​LdF c. 94, p. 164 (“praesentialiter”); cf. c. 81, p. 138, referring the Mary. 47. ​LdF c. 28, pp. 52–53; cf. LDM 3.8, pp. 157–58. 48. ​LdF c. 1, p. 5. 49. ​LdF c. 15, p. 31; c. 20, pp. 39–40.

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Dorothea’s cell was one such place.50 Prob­ably ­here as elsewhere the reference is to Christ in his divinity, but that specificity is less clear in the hagiographer’s commentary than in passages more directly reflecting Dorothea’s experience. Angela of Foligno, Margaret Ebner, Gertrude of Helfta, and Dorothea of Montau all used language that sometimes refers to a vaguer form of sensing or intuition and at other times refers to the sharper perception of vision or locution. They did not say that the latter was a way of talking about the former, or that the latter somehow emerged out of the former. They did not show any clear transition from one mode of speaking to another, as Joan of Arc did in her trial, beginning with vaguer references to voices and shifting to claims of more concretely realized visions.51 But they also did not make sharp distinction between one experience and the other; they did not say their encounter with Christ had been only intuitive and then became perceptual. That intuition and perception ­were stages in a fluid spectrum and that one could lead into the other without clear distinction are plausible interpretations, even if not a m ­ atter on which we can expect firm, incontrovertible evidence. One particularly complex and instructive example is found in the mid-­ thirteenth-­century vita of Lutgard of Aywières (1181–1246) by Thomas of Cantimpré.52 A close friend had asked Lutgard to describe the face of Christ as she beheld it in contemplation. Her answer, as reported by Thomas, is striking: “An indescribable brilliance appears to me in an instant, and I see the ineffable beauty of his glorified being like a flash of lightning. ­Were this vision not to pass quickly from the gaze of my contemplation, I would not be able to endure it and remain alive. ­After this flash, ­there remains an intellectual brilliance, and when in that brilliance I seek the one I had seen for an instant, I cannot find him.” Thomas then goes on to interpret this response: “What e­ lse is it for Christ to speak in the soul except to make pre­sent to it the riches of his goodness, wisdom, and beauty?” The soul hears Christ’s voice and is so enticed that it “melts with desire” for what it has “glimpsed,” but it has not yet attained “perfect vision,” presumably referring to the beatific vision in heaven, and so it seeks him and prepares to possess him, but the eyes of Christ flash with light so intense that it would outshine the sun more than the sun outshines the stars, and the soul is not yet prepared to see that dazzling light. Lutgard’s own account speaks 50. ​VDM 5.13.a, p. 231. 51. ​Marina Warner, Joan of Arc: The Image of Female Heroism (New York: Knopf, 1981), 118–27. 52. ​Thomas of Cantimpré, The Collected Saints’ Lives: Abbot John of Cantimpré, Christina the Astonishing, Margaret of Ypres, and Lutgard of Aywières, ed. Barbara Newman, trans. Margot H. King and Barbara Newman (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008), 281–82.



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of a vision and its aftereffect, which she characterizes as a residual “intellectual brilliance”; Thomas’s paraphrase speaks instead of a voice, and one that is manifested by attributes of goodness, wisdom, and beauty, leading the soul to seek a vision that cannot ultimately be retained in this life. Lutgard herself seems to be referring to a clear perception that lingers in the form of a vaguer and more tantalizing impression, while Thomas speaks of a vaguer and more indirect apprehension that stimulates desire for perception. In both cases t­ here is a tension between a kind of intuition and a kind of perception, even if the dynamic is differently represented in the original response and in Thomas’s gloss.

A Partial Comparison from Modern Evangelical Chris­tian­ity Evangelical Protestantism has traditionally encouraged ­people to think of themselves in personal relationship with Jesus. Preaching in this tradition, as well as Evangelical hymnody crafted in the first person singular, takes for granted that Christ is a guide who is close at hand and can be heard speaking and from whom one can expect reassurance, strength, and control.53 Tanya Luhrmann’s book When God Talks Back discusses modern Evangelical Christians who believe God communicates with them, and in some ways their experiences resemble ­those of late medieval Christians.54 For them, the communication is very largely intuitive: it comes in the flow of one’s consciousness and has to be distinguished from one’s own thoughts in ways that are taught and learned. Somewhat as a late medieval Christian might report being reassured by Christ at a time of crisis, or being told to meet a par­tic­u­lar individual, or to eat and drink in par­tic­u­lar ways, so too ­these modern Evangelicals may sense that God is telling them to go to some location, to cultivate or cut off a relationship, or to wear a specific item of clothing. As Barbara Newman has suggested, t­here are points of similarity between ­these Evangelicals and ­later medieval nuns such as ­those at Helfta: the use of conversational prayer, training of the imagination, the emergence of “experts” in prayer, cultivation of a romantic bond with Christ, even a “spirituality of the heart.” Newman points to differences as well: Luhrmann’s subjects tend t­oward a feel-­good spirituality 53. ​Examples include Charlotte Elliot’s “Just as I Am” (1835), Henry Francis Lyte’s “Abide with Me” (1847), C. Austin Miles’s “I Come to the Garden Alone” (1912), and Thomas Dorsey’s “Precious Lord” (1932). John Bode, “O Jesus, I Have Promised” (1869), is also within this tradition but more clearly in the mainstream of Anglican hymnody. 54. ​T.  M. Luhrmann, When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God (New York: Knopf, 2012).

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and do not practice liturgical worship.55 One further difference is that modern Evangelicals are likely to report t­hese communications as coming ­either from Christ or simply from “God,” which in their case does not mean specifically Christ, while late medieval Christians ­were far more likely to experience the communicating presence of Christ, even if they referred to him as “God.” Late medieval devotion was more resolutely focused on Christ in par­tic­u­lar. A more fundamental difference between Luhrmann’s Evangelicals and the late medieval devout lies in context, and h ­ ere the spectrum of presupposition, intuition, and perception is crucial. Late medieval and modern Christians might have similar intuitions of divine communication, but when late medieval individuals had such experience, it was within a society that broadly accepted the real, ubiquitous presence of Christ. Modern Evangelicals have support in their belief from their subculture, but late medieval Christians could count on most p­ eople around them accepting (at least nominally) that Christ’s ubiquitous presence was a fact. The assent of the broader society lent greater plausibility to claimed intuition. Further, if the person claiming communication with Christ could then persuade o ­ thers that she had actually heard his voice and seen his face, the claim of perception could alter that individual’s standing within society. It might at times lead to a person being seen as holy, even a saint. Thus, while the devout in late medieval society might have intuitions similar to ­those of Luhrmann’s subjects, ­those intuitions ­were contextualized by f­ actors less broadly shared in modern society, which provides less support for the presupposition of Christ’s presence and less honor for claimed perception of that presence. The intuitions might be the same for medieval and modern individuals, but the contextualizing ­factors are sharply dif­fer­ent. The situation for Luhrmann’s subjects is both less ordinary and less exceptional than for t­ hose in the late medieval West who experienced Christ’s presence—­ less ordinary, ­because they represent a par­tic­u­lar religious culture, with assumptions that cannot be taken for granted in the broader society; less exceptional, ­because the kind of contact with the divine that they claim is cultivated and widely experienced by many, perhaps in princi­ple by all who enter this religious culture. ­Children often construct imaginary friends and, playing along with ­these fantasy companions, rehearse modes of be­hav­ior that help them adjust to real-­ life situations and mature.56 For Luhrmann (in this book, although not in 55. ​Barbara Newman, “Lessons from the Vineyard: On the Pedagogy of Prayer,” Franciscan Studies 72 (2014): 453–64. 56. ​Marjorie Taylor, Imaginary Companions and the C ­ hildren Who Create Them (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); Espen Klausen and Richard H. Passman, “Pretend Companions (Imaginary Playmates): The Emergence of a Field,” Journal of Generic Psy­chol­ogy 167 (2006): 349–64; T. Gleason,



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l­ater writing), the imaginary friend provides a useful analogue to the Christ encountered in Evangelical prayer. But when late medieval individuals supposed Christ was pre­sent to them and communicating with them, they w ­ ere operating within a culture that broadly assumed Christ was pre­sent and could communicate with p­ eople, most of the time subtly and by suggestion but at times more overtly. No con­temporary hearing of a late medieval person who experienced the presence of Christ would have thought of this as like having an imaginary friend, first ­because it was not a par­tic­ul­ar friend but the same Christ who was accessible to all, second ­because he was a figure known in both an eternal and a historical setting, and third b­ ecause he was not imaginary but real and in fact spiritually pre­sent. The modern assumption is that imagination ­causes a person to think something is happening which in fact is not; in the context of medieval spirituality, imagination enables a person to recognize something as happening which in fact is. That would be the judgment not only of the one perceiving Christ’s presence but of ­others in her society. Claims of perception could be controversial, but belief in presence was not. Luhrmann’s How God Becomes Real extends the analy­sis of her ­earlier book, applying it to communities other than Evangelical Christians, and indeed developing in effect a general theory of religion.57 Her central claim is that prayer and ritual enable p­ eople to gain a sense that “gods and spirits” or “the invisible other” are “pre­sent in the moment, aware and willing to respond.”58 She refers to the pro­cess as “real-­making.” The acts that achieve this effect she calls “kindling,” ­because however small they are at the outset, they grow like fire. For ­people to feel the real­ity of the invisible other requires a par­tic­u­lar way of viewing the world (a “faith frame”), which is cultivated by detailed and vivid stories and by training but is also aided by aptitude, by a capacity for “absorption” in the object of one’s attention. The precise effects vary from one context to another: the invisible other may be experienced in one’s flow of thought, in scripture, in bodily experience, in contact with ­others. In any case the sense that the invisible other is ­really pre­sent does not come naturally and is not presupposed but requires effort, not only in Western secular society but throughout the world. The last point might seem to put Luhrmann at odds with what this book is arguing about a spectrum from presupposition to intuition and then perception. In large part, however, the difference is in formulation. When Luhrmann “Imaginary Companions,” in Encyclopedia of ­Human Relationships, ed. Harry T. Reis and Susan Sprecher (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2009), 833–34. 57. ​Luhrmann, How God Becomes Real. 58. ​Luhrmann, How God Becomes Real, x. The basic concepts laid out ­here are introduced on pages ix–xv and elaborated throughout the book.

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speaks of effort, she defines it broadly enough that all the manifestations of conventional late medieval piety—­the sacraments and sacramentals, prayer before crucifixes and madonnas, Corpus Christi pro­cessions and veneration of the exposed sacrament, and all the rest—­would fall ­under that heading. The devotional culture of the late medieval West may be far more richly articulated than what Luhrmann typically takes into account, and it may appear far more conventional, far more focused on material objects. It may also differ from most of the examples Luhrmann gives, being the culture of the mainstream, if not everyone in a community. As a culture ­children are brought up in, it is a given in the strictest sense: it is received from f­ amily, from neighbors, and from religious leaders who give it to its recipients. Still, all the religious exercises it entails would fall within the scope of what Luhrmann speaks of as the effort needed to make the invisible other r­ eally pre­sent. If ­there is a difference of interpretation between Luhrmann’s perspective and mine, it has to do with the intended result of all this effort. What I am speaking of as presupposed presence, the presence implicit in all the exercises of conventional piety, Luhrmann refers to as “knowing in the abstract that the invisible other is real,”59 and this is what she sees prayer and ritual as meant to transcend. I would say, rather, that the presupposition implied by conventional piety may lead at times to moments of more vivid intuition, and for some ­people such intuition may become frequent or even routine, but for many the richly articulated conventions of implied and presupposed presence may suffice, and subjective awareness need not be taken as a norm. Even the mystic Meister Eckhart spoke eloquently about what occurs when a person receives communion: “­There was never ­union so close; for the soul is far more closely united with God than are the body and soul that form one man.” But then he anticipates the reaction, “How can this be? I d­ on’t feel anything of the kind.” To which he replies, “What does that m ­ atter? The less that you feel and the more that you believe, the more praiseworthy is your faith.”60 The ­union effected by the sacrament is objectively real. Gertrude of Helfta similarly represents Christ as saying that the divine power emanating from him has efficacy like that of a medicinal potion even if the recipient is unaware of its effect.61 In pinpointing this objective efficacy as crucial, Eckhart and Gertrude speak for their culture. Not every­one saw t­ hings quite the same way; as we w ­ ill see, Walter Hilton did think of feeling “the lively inspiration of grace caused by the spiritual presence 59. ​Luhrmann, How God Becomes Real, x. 60. ​Eckhart, Counsels on Discernment, Counsel 20, in Meister Eckhart, The Essential Sermons, Commentaries, Treatises, and Defense, trans. Edmund Colledge and Bernard McGinn (Ramsey, NJ: Paulist Press, 1981), 272. 61. ​LDP 3.9.4, pp. 38–41 (Barratt, 44); see Harrison, “Thousands and Thousands of Lovers,” 202.



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of Jesus in our soul” as a desideratum.62 But even the mystics did not expect that a vivid awareness of presence would be integral to the everyday experience of most ­people. Having myself been raised in a ­later phase of that culture, when its liturgical and devotional manifestations still went largely unchallenged among insiders, I then attended a Catholic university in the 1960s, when many w ­ ere beginning to take subjective reaction as the norm for religion and to ask what personal satisfaction they might derive from it. On one occasion I mentioned to Walter Ong the difficulty of experiencing personal impact or feeling in the liturgy, and he replied rather severely that the expectation of a felt response was a Protestant concern, not Catholic.63 That moment more than all the rest of my four years with the Jesuits was what gave me a specifically Catholic education. To be sure, the culture I had been raised in did honor religious intuitions and venerated the saints who perceived Christ in visions and locutions, but the intuitions might be intermittent, and the perceptions rare, while routine was the common expectation, and objectively efficacious effect did not require subjective evidence. Exceptional forms of religion can be understood only in relationship to the more ordinary forms in which they are grounded. The mystical presence of Christ in late medieval texts presupposes that common network of conventional piety that characterized the last medieval centuries, an age when mystical experience and emerging devotional conventions flourished in a complex symbiosis. In the late medieval West, liturgical and sacramental religion was extended into a richly articulated devotional culture of “sacramentals” that made signs of presupposed presence ubiquitous in parish churches, increasingly abundant in the public sphere, and a ­matter of common experience in religious ­houses. Even for t­ hose who never expected to perceive the presence of Christ in manifest experience or perhaps even to intuit that presence in any remarkable or memorable way, constant exposure to a world of sacraments and sacramentals made mediated presence a fact of everyday life. They might never see Christ in a vision or hear his voice, but all their senses w ­ ere engaged in a network of symbolic reference. They went to ser­vices in which incense, filtered light, chant, blessed and consecrated bread, and palpable objects of devotion all presupposed a sacred presence. They witnessed elevation of the newly consecrated host, sometimes rushing forward to see that spectacle. They visited chapels to pray before images, speaking out loud or mentally to the 62. ​Walter Hilton, The Scale of Perfection, trans. John P. H. Clark and Rosemary Dorward (New York: Paulist, 1991), 287–88. 63. ​This conversation would have occurred prob­ably in 1966 or 1967, in a lounge in DuBourg Hall at Saint Louis University.

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Christ and other sacred figures whose presence was concretized in t­ hose images. They moved in pro­cession through the streets and into the fields ­behind the crucified and sacramental body of Christ. As they walked through town they might encounter street corners where a sculptor’s Christ gazed down at them from the arms of his m ­ other. In all t­ hese ways their movement placed them in a sacred milieu that assumed Christ’s presence and gave vis­i­ble and tangible signs of it. His presence to them was implied by their presence to him. None of this suggests a romantic view of ordinary parishioners overbrimming with piety. The point is exactly the contrary: even ­those who ­were not particularly devout lived in a milieu in which presence on all sides was presupposed by conventional objects, be­hav­iors, and language.64 For ­those who ­were inclined to piety, the mediating forms of spiritual presence w ­ ere in themselves richly engaging and might suffice, even without intuitions and perceptions of that presence. For some, however, t­ hose ordinary forms might prepare the way for exceptional experience. Both points are crucial: first, that the sacramental culture could in itself be experienced as rich and sufficient, and it would be misleading to read into it a straining for the exceptional; second, that when some ­people occasionally and ­others frequently did have experiences such as Christophany, they were grounded in and prepared for by the same broadly shared sacramental culture. Even the exceptions became absorbed into the routine: saints such as Catherine of Siena and Birgitta of Sweden became foci of devotion for ordinary Christians who would never expect to experience what they did.

Perception with the Inner Senses When individuals ­were said to hear or see Christ, the voice or vision was usually said to come to the “inner senses,” which was on the ­whole superior to perceiving him with one’s bodily ears and eyes.65 When a blind ­sister of Töss 64. ​The argument ­here is consonant with that of Robert  A. Orsi, History and Presence (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), although I am somewhat more interested in the complex relationship between ordinary and exceptional ways awareness of presence is articulated, and in the connection between accounts of presence and specifically Christocentric devotions. 65. ​For example, SB Katharinental, 119–20. The sources do sometimes speak of seeing Christ with the bodily eyes (SB Unterlinden, 440, SB Adelhausen, 171–72). Augustine argued that even in ordinary perception the inner senses judge what is presented to them by the outer senses and thus stand superior to them. Augustine, Letter 147.17.41, in The Works of Saint Augustine, pt. 2, vol. 1, trans. Roland Teske, ed. Boniface Ramsey (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 1990), 340–41: “You judge not by the same eyes of the flesh but by t­ hose interior eyes even concerning the vis­i­ble ­things themselves upon which the bodily eyes somehow cast the rays of their sight and concerning t­hese vis­i­ble eyes and their sight, however fine and ­great it may be. . . . ​Who, then, would not prefer t­ hose interior eyes to t­ hese exterior eyes as inestimably



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was in the infirmary, another s­ ister heard her call out that Christ and the Virgin and all the heavenly host ­were ­there with her, and the account concludes, “She must have seen this with spiritual eyes, ­because she did not see it with bodily eyes.”66 The distinction between outward and inward perception could be expressed variously. When Margaret of Cortona was taken to the feet of Christ “intellectually” and perceived Christ “mentally” on the cross, the meaning is prob­ably the same as when ­others speak of inner or spiritual senses.67 Christ was pre­sent to Gertrude Rickeldey at all times, “intimate” (heimlich) with her, standing by her as a special friend, pre­sent in her heart and mind, and pre­ sent with special graces.68 Her sense of Christ’s presence was grounded in a habit of introspection: she was “always turned ­toward the inner self of her spirit,” and “looked at all times within herself,” which is where she perceived Christ’s revelations.69 Her senses “­were drawn inside”; Christ “became pre­ sent to her in the spirit,” barefoot and clad as in his life on earth, begging h ­ ouse to h ­ ouse as he did on earth, even in pelting rain. He was pre­sent to her and appeared to her in spirit just as clearly as if he ­were appearing to her bodily eyes.70 Her perception of Christ was generally with the inward senses, and perhaps chiefly ­because she was so inclined to introspection it seemed natu­ral to find Christ chiefly within herself, accessible to inner rather than outer senses. Perceiving Christ with the bodily senses was not altogether ruled out: the biography of Catherine of Siena (1347–1380) says he communicated with her sometimes by inward inspiration but at other times with the outer senses, “openly appearing and speaking to me just as I am at this moment speaking to yourself.”71 More often, however, Christophany involved the inner senses, and what came to the inward senses might be clearly delineated but might also have the vague and indistinct quality of intuition. Language of inner or spiritual senses had been common in theological lit­ er­a­ture since the time of Origen (184–253). Usually it referred to the ways God could be perceived, most obviously a­ fter death but in exceptional cases during earthly life. The sense of sight was sometimes taken as providing the best more valuable?” (cf. 348). When a lover (prob­ably Heloise) writes to her beloved, she says “nothing can make me stop gazing at you with my inner eyes” (Barbara Newman, Making Love in the Twelfth C ­ entury: “Letters of Two Lovers” in Context [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016], 159). 66. ​SB Töss, 86. 67. ​VMC 6.18 (Renna, 164). 68. ​Mulder-­Bakker, The Dedicated Spiritual Life, c. 1, pp. 113–14; c. 10, p. 144; c. 13, p. 162; c. 21, p. 203; c. 23, p. 210; c. 31, p. 241; c. 17, p. 183; c. 2, pp. 118–19; c. 10, p. 145. 69. ​Mulder-­Bakker, The Dedicated Spiritual Life, c. 9, p. 142; c. 27, p. 227. 70. ​Mulder-­Bakker, The Dedicated Spiritual Life, c. 18, p. 188. 71. ​VCS 1.9.84 (Kearns, 77) (“Fatebaturque mihi, quod in principio hujus visionis, quæ, ut in pluribus, fuit imaginaria, quandoque vero patuit etiam exterioribus sensibus corporis, ita ut vocem aure corporali perciperet”). For another example see VCH c. 10, trans. p. 15.

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analogy for the perception of God, b­ ecause it was the sense that involved least direct contact with its material object. Alternatively, touch and taste might seem apt ­because they suggested intimate contact between the soul and God. Theologians differed in their opinion on w ­ hether the spiritual senses w ­ ere utterly detached from bodily senses or ­were part of a holistic body-­soul unity.72 They did not, however, typically hold that the spiritual senses could be employed discursively: that with one’s spiritual ears one could hear dialogue or that spiritual eyes could see a narrative unfolding. Unlike theology, hagiography and lit­er­a­ture of revelation do speak of the inner senses as capable of perceiving dialogue and narratable sequences of events. ­These could then be remembered and reported with as much specificity as what one had perceived with one’s bodily senses, even if the language of inner sensation left open the possibility that perception had an imaginative quality and could involve the creative reworking of intuition. Johannes Marienwerder’s account of Dorothea of Montau’s experience is not only rich in reference to Christophany but explicit in its reflection on the phenomenon, particularly on her experience of inner sensation. Marienwerder says Christ spoke in three ways to Dorothea’s soul. Sometimes he spoke through spiritual vision of an image or likeness that had some hidden significance. Secondly he spoke in h ­ uman manner, in some bodily form,73 in which case she heard his words more clearly and surely than when a person hears and understands words spoken by another ordinary person. And thirdly he spoke to her intimately by intelligible expression of truth, without the mediation of any creature, and without the repre­sen­ta­tion of any likeness actually perceived or inwardly ­imagined.74 This is clearly an adaptation of Augustine’s schema of bodily, spiritual (or imaginative), and intellectual visions,75 although the first and second are reversed. More importantly, all three modes of manifestation are presented to her soul, to her spiritual and not her corporeal senses. 72. ​Karl Rahner, “The ‘Spiritual Senses’ According to Origen,” Theological Investigations (New York: Seabury, 1979), 16: 81–103; Paul L. Gavrilyuk and Sarah Coakley, eds., The Spiritual Senses: Perceiving God in Western Chris­tian­ity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Michael Camille, “Before the Gaze: The Internal Senses and Late Medieval Practices of Seeing,” in Visuality Before and Beyond the Re­nais­sance: Seeing as ­Others Saw, ed. Robert S. Nelson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 197–223. Nicholas Watson, “The Trinitarian Hermeneutic in Julian of Norwich’s Revelation of Love,” in The Medieval Mystical Tradition in ­England: Exeter Symposium V, ed. Marion Glasscoe (Cambridge: Brewer, 1992), esp. 88–91, analyzes Julian’s in­ter­est­ing and instructive use of ­these concepts. 73. ​VDM 3.21.e, p. 140 (“in aliqua corporali effigie”). 74. ​VDM 3.21.e, pp. 140–41 (“sine representacione alicuius similitudinis realiter sensate, vel intrinsecus fanthasiate”); Dominus ­here for “Christ.” 75. ​On Augustine’s schema, see Barbara Newman, “What Did It Mean to Say ‘I Saw’?: The Clash between Theory and Practice in Medieval Visionary Culture,” Speculum 80 (2005): 6–7.



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Dorothea did on occasion hear the voice of Christ as an outward, bodily phenomenon, coming from the consecrated host: he spoke to her from out of a tabernacle in which the sacrament had been reserved, and through the win­dow of her cell she heard his voice as a sound proceeding from the tabernacle.76 But this was the exception, and it emanated from the one source in which Christ was taken to be pre­sent in bodily form, the consecrated host. Other­wise she emphasized that her revelations came to her inner rather than outer senses. Corporeal manifestations, perceived by the bodily senses, could too easily be illusions or deceptions. T ­ hose that came to the inner senses—­which from our perspective may seem far closer to what we would call intuitions—­were more reliable. Even if she wanted corporeal vision, it was denied her: when Christ came to her with his saints, “she would gladly have seen with the eyes of the flesh,” but she was unable to open her bodily eyes.77 Closing her outer senses, she opened the inward ones, giving each its proper way of perceiving her bridegroom.78 What she perceived with her inner senses was primarily the inward divine presence—­she sensed (sensi) the divine presence, or she perceived (percipiebat) Christ playing within her soul—­but she might also sense (sensit) her own inner state, in par­tic­ u­lar her inward wounds.79 She perceived not only with inner vision and hearing but with the full range of her inner senses: Christ opened for her the senses of her soul, teaching her to understand, see, hear, smell, taste, and touch by her inner senses, all of which ­were attuned to his presence.80 When Christ closed her outer senses and opened her inner ones, her intellect was more clearly illuminated and she perceived him more clearly than before, and with the eyes and ears of her soul she attended carefully to his inspiration and his voice.81 Perception through the inner senses could mean abstraction from the environment as normally perceived: when all of Dorothea’s inner senses ­were opened and attuned to spiritual ­things, her outer senses ­were as if closed off, so she was oblivious to outward t­hings and had no use of her outer senses. ­There might be a ­g reat commotion in the church where she sat in contemplation, but she did not hear it in the least, although when she returned to herself

76. ​VDM 5.39.d, pp. 274–75; also 3.1.e, p. 113; 3.4.a, p. 116; 5.7.f, p. 220; cf. LDM 3.17, pp. 168–70; LdF c. 123, p. 209. 77. ​VDM 5.14.b, pp. 232–33. 78. ​VDM 6.6.g, p. 297; LDM 2.23, pp. 116–18. 79. ​VDM 4.36.g, p.  205 (“dulcedinem presencie divine sensi”); 4.28.b, p.  193 (“percipiebat”); 4.13.b, p. 170 (“sensit”). 80. ​VDM 1.2.h., p. 34; 5.37.c, pp. 271–72; cf. 4.3.c, p. 155; 4.35.g, p. 203; 6.6.g, p. 297. 81. ​VDM 5.40.a, pp. 275–76.

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even light footsteps could be disturbing. Walking through town, she might see nothing with her outer eyes, and might perceive only by inner vision.82 The language of inward perception may seem confusing. We are accustomed to thinking that if perception is of something objectively pre­sent, it ­will be mediated by senses whose function it is to give knowledge of external realities, and that perception not based on such mediation can be only of subjective ­mental states, even if ­those states involve imaginative or hallucinatory suppositions about external objects. For someone who believes in ghosts, perceiving a ghost is usually thought of as an experience that involves corporeal sensation of an external object, w ­ hether or not the ghost is in any meaningful sense embodied; for an unbeliever, such experience can only be imagination or hallucination.83 When Dorothea perceives Christ and his entourage, however, she is represented as experiencing objective but spiritual realities that are not registered by bodily sensation, only by the spiritual senses. The spiritual senses are also referred to as “inward,” even if they are taken to give access to outward realities that have spatial extension, as when they fill Dorothea’s cell. How does inward or spiritual perception differ from intuition? The sources that report such experience, such as Marienwerder’s writings on Dorothea, almost always represent them as having the clarity and detail of perception and speak of them as perception. It is for the most part the modern observer with knowledge of psychological pro­cess who ­will note how intuition can shade into perception, especially when the perception is “inward.” Some late medieval writings may gesture in the direction of this fluidity; Marienwerder’s do not. Still, construing “inner perception” as closely analogous to intuition helps account for the paradox of an inward apprehension of outward real­ity.84

82. ​LdF c. 7, p. 16; LdF c. 29, p. 55; LdF c. 34, pp. 63 and 64; c. 35, p. 65; c. 83, pp. 140–41; LdF c. 59, p. 98; LdF c. 33, p. 63; c. 90, p. 155; LdF c. 82, p. 139; LdF c. 204, p. 179. 83. ​An acquaintance once told me of his own experience of a ghost, which occurred during the night. When he re­created the experience the next morning, having someone stand in the position where he had seen the ghost, he realized he was now able to see the person clearly b­ ecause he was wearing his glasses, while during the night the apparition had been blurred ­because his glasses ­were not on, which to him counted as evidence that the apparition was external to himself. While telling the story, he added that he still did not believe in ghosts, or even in an afterlife, although he could neither deny nor account for his own experience. 84. ​For the modern psy­chol­ogy of intuition, see Alessandro Cordelli, “Rational Thought and Intuition in Religious Experience,” in Psy­chol­ogy of Intuition, ed. Bartoli Ruelas and Vanessa Briseño (New York: Nova Science, 2010), 139–53; David G. Myers, Intuition: Its Powers and Perils (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002). For discussion of intuition from the perspective of relevant psychological systems, see Ronald Britton, Belief and Imagination: Explorations in Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1998); Nathalie Pilard, Jung and Intuition: On the Centrality and Variety of Forms of Intuition in Jung and Post-­Jungians (London: Karnac, 2015); and Roberto Assagioli, Psychosynthesis: A Collection of Basic Writings (Amherst, MA: Synthesis Center, 2000).



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Passages throughout the book of Margery Kempe, possibly ascribable to a scribe or editor, more likely coming from Kempe herself, give several clues to the ways encounter with Christ could be conceived. At times she heard unaccountable sounds (an unidentified voice, or indistinct sounds and melodies) physically, with her bodily ears,85 but when Christ spoke to her it was almost always “to her mind,” “to her thought,” or “to her soul.”86 At times it becomes clear that she is construing what­ever insight comes to her as the voice of Christ. Indeed, as we have seen, at one point she resolves to believe that “­every good thought is the speech of God,”87 which comes startlingly close to an admission that her locutions w ­ ere—or sometimes might be—­simply her own thoughts construed as inspired by Christ. Granted, the distinction she is making h ­ ere is not between divine revelation and ­human imagination, but rather between divine and demonic inspiration. Still, she does not say that e­ very voice that utters edifying discourse is divine; she says, rather that ­every good thought can be taken as coming from a divine source. Is this in fact an admission that her experiences are less extraordinary than they might seem to be? It would surely be truer to say that she senses keenly a divine message literally entering her consciousness and directing her thoughts, so that she recognizes as truly divine what another person might mistakenly assume to be merely natu­ral. Her agonizing over the possibility of demonic deception is impor­tant for an understanding of her claim. She clearly believed that when an evil thought came to her, this too was not simply the product of her imagination: it too was the inspiration of a literally pre­sent but malign intelligence working within her. ­Whether the source was divine or demonic, benign or malignant, one would not need to assume an extraordinary locution or inspiration, b­ ecause communications of this sort w ­ ere everyday occurrences. Late medieval Christians took as obvious that demons ­were busily at work perverting the minds of all, not just Margery, and presumably Christ too spoke in other p­ eople’s souls. In some situations she may have had thoughts that she recognized as temptations, and she might have said some version of “That’s the Devil talking!” In ­others she not only might have said but did say “That’s God—or Christ—­talking!” In both cases she would have taken this characterization as literally true. Kempe refers at several points to her “feelings.”88 This term as she uses it can refer to her experience, which may also be of a revelation but may more generally be of grace or divine action. In ­these cases “feeling” clearly refers to 85. ​BMK 1.54, 1.78 (Windeatt 69, 225–26). 86. ​BMK 1.6, 9, 14, 23, 26, 29, 30, 34–35, 38–39, 42–44, 50, 56, 59, 69–70, 73, 76, 77–81, 84–85, 88–89; 2.2–3, 5. 87. ​BMK 1.59 (Windeatt, 185): “euery good thowt is þe speche of God.” 88. ​BMK 1.89 (Windeatt, 261).

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her response more than to what­ever evokes it.89 The term may refer to her emotional reaction generally and not to any one par­tic­u­lar experience or event, as when she says she has much feeling for the humanity of Christ.90 Elsewhere, however, she seems to equate “feelings” with revelations, or she speaks of having revelations “in feeling,” recognizing that such experiences can be true or false.91 Even so, when she speaks of “feeling” or “feelings” she calls to the reader’s attention that what she is reporting is not simply a manifestation but her experience and response to it. She may even recognize a gap between what is objectively manifested and what she subjectively experiences, as when she acknowledges that Christ is pre­sent “in the sight of her soul” but says that “to her feeling” it is as if he w ­ ere physically pre­sent.92 It is tempting to interpret this language about “feelings” as referring to intuition, but it might be more accurate to say that it is unspecific enough that it could apply to e­ ither intuitions or perceptions, or for that m ­ atter to intuitions l­ ater remembered and reported as having the clarity and distinctness of perception. One interpreter of Kempe argues that in the end she was not exceptional but rather “a typical product of late medieval En­glish religious life.” This conclusion rests largely on the observation that she used imaginative meditation on the life of Christ as recommended by late medieval manuals of meditation and that she shared the fervor of Richard Rolle.93 This conclusion is difficult to reconcile with Kempe’s highly effusive devotion. Simply as a personality, she ­adopted a far higher pitch than t­hose around her. What more sharply distinguishes her from her pious contemporaries, however, was her tendency to speak of experiencing Christ in terms of perceptions. She might at times tip her hand and speak in terms that suggested she was intuiting rather than perceiving him, but more typically she spoke of hearing Christ and at times seeing him, and she was known to o ­ thers as a w ­ oman who spoke with “God” and to whom “God” spoke.94 While she shared with her contemporaries a conviction of 89. ​Christ speaks of the feeling of grace that is found in speaking or in weeping; see BMK 1.14 (Windeatt, 65–67). 90. ​BMK 1.35 (Windeatt, 122–24). 91. ​She speaks of having many revelations in feeling (“Many mo swech reuelacyons þis creatur had in felyng”), including feelings of the living and the dead, the saved and the damned, and she finds ­these feelings burdensome and fears they are deceptive; see BMK 1.23 (Windeatt, 89–90). In BMK 1.71 (Windeatt, 211) she is pleased to find that her feeling is true. She tells o ­ thers about her feelings, but she does so with trepidation, knowing that feelings are hard to understand and that ­people sometimes think of her revelations as deceptive; see BMK 1.89 (Windeatt, 260–61). 92. ​BMK 1.85 (Windeatt, 249): “to hir felyng it weryn as it had ben very flesch & bon.” 93. ​Raymond A. Powell, “Margery Kempe: An Exemplar of Late Medieval En­glish Piety,” Catholic Historical Review 89 (2003): 1–23. 94. ​BMK 1.12 (“I her seyn God spekyth on-to þe”) and 1.29 (“þe w ­ oman of Inglond þe which þei had herd seyd spak wyth God”).



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Christ’s ubiquitous accessibility, in reporting on her experience she moved dramatically t­ oward the assertion not of intuition but of perception.

The Role of Imagination The term “imagination” has vari­ous meanings in modern usage. Devotionalism can serve as a stimulus to what we might call “realized imagination,” and to speak in ­those terms is to suggest the range of meanings “imagination” can have in modern perspective. What a person imagines can be taken as real­ity, or can become real­ity, or can be recognized as real­ity. It is taken as real­ity when something that exists only in the mind is thought to exist outside the mind, when fantasy is confused with real­ity or made into a falsehood claiming real­ ity. What a person imagines becomes real­ity when something that begins in the mind is made into a real­ity, when, through deliberate effort, fantasy becomes the stuff of a­ ctual experience, and imagination has power to inspire action that makes it real­ity. What a person imagines is recognized as real­ity when a notion that might seem pure fantasy turns out to correspond to a real­ity outside the mind, when imagination has the capacity to expand one’s recognition of what is already real, when it becomes a means for discovering something in the material or spiritual world.95 The pious late medieval Christian praying before the crucifix, addressing the Crucified, and then hearing him speak back to her, or the nun fondling the baby Jesus lifted from the cradle and interacting with him as with a real child, or the reader of dialogical meditations who begins to extemporize such dialogue and to hear within her head spontaneous responses from Christ—­all ­these can be interpreted by an unsympathetic outsider as cases of realized imagination in the sense of delusion. A more sympathetic outsider would see them as instances of realized imagination in the second sense, meaning imagination that actually establishes a relationship with Christ, giving a clear sense of his presence. Someone more deeply steeped in the culture would take them as examples of realized imagination in the third sense: imagination that gives concrete manifestation to a presence that has been ­there all along. But what did “imagination” mean to t­ hose in the l­ ater medieval West who used the term? Fundamentally, for most medieval phi­los­o­phers imagination was not the actively creative power of bringing forth repre­sen­ta­tions and images that are not found directly in real­ity (a modern understanding), but the receptive power of representing inwardly to the intellect that which the senses 95. ​The third sense of “imagination” is eloquently expressed in J. K. Rowling, “The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination,” Harvard Gazette, June 5, 2008.

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perceived in the outer world.96 Michelle Karnes has explored the central role that imagination held in the Aristotelian tradition of epistemology, where it was more positively viewed than in Platonic thought.97 For Aristotle and his followers, cognition requires the presence of images that are presented to the mind by the imagination. Imagination serves as “a bridge between sense and reason,” giving subject m ­ atter from sense data in a form accessible to the mind. In a rather dif­fer­ent mode, imagination could be used in late medieval meditation to proj­ect oneself back into the events of the biblical past. This had been one use of imagination explic­itly for Bonaventure, and less explic­itly for ­others writers who did not bring the same tools of philosophical analy­sis to their writings. Late medieval phi­los­o­phers also made use of what we would call thought experiments, which for them involved proceeding “by imagination” (procedere secundum imaginationem).98 Most often, in philosophical discourse, imagination could be seen as impor­ tant for grasping what was physically pre­sent and for creating images of objects and events not literally pre­sent. Less clear is the role it might play in grasping what was literally but not physically pre­sent. For that question Bonaventure is, as Karnes shows, a key figure. She quotes a passage from his Collationes in Hexaëmeron (Lectures on the six days of creation): Christ teaches interiorly, so that no truth is known except through Him, not through speech as it is with us, but through inner enlightenment. . . . ​ He Himself, then, is intimate to e­ very soul, and He shines forth by means of His most clear species upon the obscure species of our understanding. And in this manner, ­these obscure species, mixed with the darkness of phantasms, are lit up in such a way that the intellect understands.99 This passage suggests that Christ’s inward presence is required not for the special consciousness of Christ himself but for all cognition. But that presupposed presence is something the individual can become aware of in meditation, through an 96. ​See for this distinction Martin Thurner, “Imagination als Kreativität nach Nicolaus Cusanus,” in Intellect et imagination sans la philosophie médiévale / Intellect and Imagination in Medieval Philosophy / Intelecto e imaginação na Filosofia Medieval, ed. M. C. Pacheco and J. F. Meirinhos (Turnhout: Brepols, 2006), 3:1695–1707, who suggests that Cusanus is in precisely this re­spect innovative. See also Murray Wright Bundy, The Theory of Imagination in Classical and Medieval Thought (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1927), especially 177–98 (chap. 9, “Medieval Descriptive Psy­chol­ogy”) and 199–224 (chap. 10, “The Psy­chol­ogy of the Mystics,” which focuses on the thirteenth ­century). 97. ​Michelle Karnes, Imagination, Meditation, and Cognition in the M ­ iddle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). 98. ​Thomas Dewender, “Imaginary Experiments,” Intellect et imagination sans la philosophie médiévale / Intellect and Imagination in Medieval Philosophy / Intelecto e imaginação na Filosofia Medieval, ed. M. C. Pacheco and J. F. Meirinhos (Turnhout: Brepols, 2006), 3:1823–33. 99. ​Karnes, Imagination, Meditation, and Cognition, 76, 104.



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act fundamentally the same as what we are calling “realized imagination” in the third sense: use of the imagination neither to grasp what is physically pre­sent and accessible to the outer senses nor to construct what is not literally pre­sent at all, but to recognize a presence that is real but specifically spiritual. On Karnes’s reading, Bonaventure’s Lignum vitae hinges on the idea that “­imagined presence” deepens intimacy with Christ.100 Christ is not simply i­magined pre­sent, but imagination is required to recognize his ­actual presence. On this point as on o ­ thers—in par­tic­u­lar with regard to the conceptions of intuition, the inner senses, eternity, and the person and natures of Christ, all of which we have already examined—it would be misleading to assign priority ­either to formal theology and philosophy or to devotional texts, as if devotion took its lead from the “high culture” of the theologians and phi­los­o­ phers, or as if the schoolmen w ­ ere giving after-­the-­fact interpretation of what had been established in religious practice. Nuns and monks, professors and lay ­people could all pray and meditate, could all share some sense of Christ’s presence and accessibility, could agree that the eternally divine person had “come down” and taken on ­human nature, and could all attempt to make sense of basic Christian belief and experience. If they gave voice to shared or similar articulations, ­these might or might not result from influence in one direction or the other. ­People often speak in similar terms ­because they live in a shared world of experience.101

Occasions for Realization of Presence: Anxiety and Reassurance Christophany could often be a ground of authority, but at least as often it was a source of reassurance and consolation.102 Intuition and possibly also perception 100. ​Karnes, Imagination, Meditation, and Cognition, 133, 139. 101. ​Herbert Grundmann, Religious Movements in the ­Middle Ages: The Historical Links between Heresy, the Mendicant ­Orders, and the ­Women’s Religious Movement in the Twelfth and Thirteenth ­Century, with the Historical Foundations of German Mysticism, trans. Steven Rowan (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995), 183, argues that “the theological system and speculative doctrines of German mystics ­were not the foundation, the starting-­point, or the source, but rather they are intellectual justifications and efforts at the theoretical ordering and theological digesting of the religious experiences which first arose from the mystical activities of the w ­ omen’s religious movement.” Amy Hollywood, The Soul as Virgin Wife: Mechthild of Magdeburg, Marguerite Porete, and Meister Eckhart (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995), 4–5, quotes this passage and qualifies it with the observation that ­there are ­women’s writings that do provide access to w ­ omen’s modes of mystical language. Presumably Grundmann, Hollywood, and I would all agree that w ­ omen’s writing cannot be seen as derivative. 102. ​See John W. Coakley, ­Women, Men, and Spiritual Power: Female Saints and Their Male Collaborators (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 94–95, 99, 106, 164–65, 180, 222, 224.

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of Christ’s presence might come at times of special need, particularly when a person craved comfort or reassurance, with the expectation that the need would be met by a divine response that implied presence. It is not surprising that Christophany often occurs during prolonged illness, when the patient is cut off from normal contact with the community and from liturgy. If the awareness of Christ’s presence begins with intuition and proceeds to perception, it would not be surprising if it occurred frequently at moments when a troubled soul was seeking comfort and was ­eager for a voice of reassurance. A skeptical outsider would phrase the point one way: that neediness breeds invention, even delusion. An insider might say rather that anxiety leaves a person aware of her own limitations and open to divine assistance, while robust self-­ confidence keeps a person from realizing ­either the need for or the availability of that aid. In any case, it is not surprising that t­ hose who report experiences of Christ’s presence and hear his voice often do so at times when they are anxious and in need of reassurance. This is perhaps the closest our sources come to Friedrich Schleiermacher’s notion of intuition, which is shown in the recognition of a superior being on whom creatures are radically dependent.103 Friedrich Sunder’s revelations came often as consolation at times when he needed support. He felt the weight of responsibilities entrusted to him when he was old and sick. The burden of his sins oppressed him. Repeatedly the experience of Christ came in response to such moments of crisis. He had no ­family on earth and needed support from heavenly ­family and friends. Often he felt alienated from Christ and from the Virgin. On one such occasion he was sitting alone at t­ able, and Christ came to him, comforting him as one does a friend cast down in depression, assuring him he might seem to have been distant but he was all the time attending to him in heaven and on earth.104 At one point in par­tic­u­lar revelation came to Gertrude Rickeldey as reassurance at a time of fear and despondency amid uncertain developments in her life. Christ said to her, “Go through, and go beyond happily. Go through safely, and accomplish what has been given to you to do. And be assured that, if you do this, fear and need, horror and fright, suffering and pain s­hall never touch you again from eternity to eternity. And be assured that this is the last judgment that ­will ever be held over you.”105 103. ​Wayne L. Proudfoot, “Intuition and Fantasy in ‘On Religion,’ ” in Interpreting Religion: The Significance of Friedrich Schleiermacher’s “Reden über die Religion” for Religious Studies and Theology, ed. Dietrich Korsch and Amber L. Griffioen (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2011), 87–98. 104. ​“Das Gnaden-­Leben des Friedrich Sunder,” 396–97, 436–37. 105. ​Mulder-­Bakker, The Dedicated Spiritual Life, c. 23, p. 210. While instructions from Christ are frequent in this text, dialogue with him is reported in only a few cases, typically in connection with death and



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Raymond of Capua does not typically portray Catherine of Siena as ridden with anxiety and needing reassurance in the face of peril, but at one critical juncture Christ did give assurance in advance: when he commissioned her to embark on a public life, he told her he would shower her with astonishing spiritual graces that would extend to her body and in par­tic­u­lar her heart, and as she plunged “into public activity of e­ very kind,” he would be always beside her and would protect her.106 Longing for reassurance was a particularly prominent theme in the autobiographies of two ­women of the early fifteenth ­century, Margery Kempe and Alijt Bake, and it is prob­ably not a coincidence that a sense of doubt and a need for affirmation are found in the subjects’ own writings rather than in hagiography or books of revelation. Elsewhere as well the striving for reassurance is a theme in late medieval lit­er­a­ture with strongly autobiographical ele­ments, particularly in the writings of Henry Suso and Rulman Merswin.107 Margery Kempe was the paradigmatic case of this quest for reassurance. Her book begins by announcing that it is meant to bring comfort, and as Rebecca Krug points out, Kempe repeats the word “comfort” almost 150 times, working not within the familiar Boethian tradition of consolation in the face of grief but within an alternative tradition that offers comfort to t­hose who feel themselves sinful and wretched.108 That is the primary context for reassurance in Kempe’s life and book, although she also seeks and finds reassurance when facing imminent danger. One night as she lies in bed she hears with her bodily ears a loud voice crying her name. She awakens, terrified, and prays in silence. Then Christ, who is pre­sent everywhere, speaks and comforts her.109 What she hears physically is disturbing; what she hears spiritually is reassuring. The experience is typical for Margery both in its manner and in its content. Throughout the book we find Christ assuring Kempe that she w ­ ill find sufficient strength, that she ­will have mercy, that she w ­ ill receive forgiveness, salvation, and love, that she ­will attain recognition, that ­favors she requests ­will be granted, that her desire ­will be satisfied, that an adversary ­will be out of afterlife. She tells Christ that she wishes to die and be with him, and he tells her that when the time is right, he w ­ ill come and lead her to eternal bliss (c. 13, pp. 162–63). She urges him to take a d­ ying man to his heavenly reward, and Christ says the man needs to stay on earth a while longer, ­because a thousand souls are being prepared to receive him in heaven, and he has to wait for them (c. 19, p. 190). He assures her that one w ­ oman ­will be saved a­ fter much suffering and enduring such pain as not to know w ­ hether she is in hell or purgatory, although Christ is willing to shorten the time of purgation (c. 19, p. 195). 106. ​VCS 2.5 (Kearns, 158–59). 107. ​Suso, The Exemplar, 61–204; Rulman Merswin, Mystical Writings, ed. Thomas S. Kepler (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1960), 39–52. 108. ​Rebecca Krug, Margery Kempe and the Lonely Reader (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2017), 24–57. 109. ​BMK 1.54: “owr merciful Lord ouyral pre­sent.”

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God’s ­favor, that she w ­ ill gain access to clergy she wishes to contact.110 Christ provides assurance that Kempe or someone e­ lse ­will attain salvation, although sometimes a­ fter a period in purgatory or ­after repentance.111 More generally he assures her of divine support or her own worthiness.112 On two occasions Christ assures her in terms reminiscent of The Cloud of Unknowing that he gave regard not for a past life of sin but rather for the ­will to live well in the ­future.113 He guarantees that she w ­ ill enjoy a reward for her exertions and sufferings.114 Once in comforting her he says it would please him more that she suffer scorn and humiliation than for her head to be struck off thrice daily over seven years, so she should not be afraid of what anyone says to her but should rejoice in her sorrows, which ­will be turned to joy in heaven.115 Given the prominence of pilgrimage in her book and her apprehension about the dangers of travel, it is not surprising that Christ assures Kempe at times that she w ­ ill be safe from danger especially in t­hese travels.116 He assures her of the funds and the companions she needs.117 He himself ­will accompany her, make provision for her, lead her abroad and home again in safety, ensure that no fellow countrymen w ­ ill die in the ship she sails in, and keep evil ­people from harming her. She fears traveling through war-­ravaged lands, but Christ assures her no one ­will harm her or her companions. A ­woman with a handsome husband would go with him wherever he wished, and t­ here is none more handsome or good as he, so she should not fear to travel with him, and he ­will bring her home safe to ­England.118 Comparison with Birgitta of Sweden on this point is apt. Christ called Birgitta, like Kempe, to visit the Holy Land as a pilgrim.119 He upbraided her for reluctance to take up the journey, assuring her he would be with her and guide and protect her, procuring all 110. ​BMK 1.17 (Windeatt, 73–74); 1.23, p. 89; 1.5, pp. 51–52, 1.64, pp. 196–98, 1.74, p. 216; 1.56, p. 177, 1.63, pp. 195–96; 1.57, pp. 179–80; 1.58, p. 181; 1.34, pp. 121–22, 1.63, p. 194; 1.69, p. 208, 1.71, p. 211. 111. ​BMK 1.12 (Windeatt, 61), 1.19, p. 81, 1.36, p. 127, 1.37, pp. 128–29, 1.8, p. 55. 112. ​BMK 1.14–15 (Windeatt, 65–68), 1.32, pp. 117–18, 1.38, p. 129, 1.44, p. 143, 1.44, p. 141, 1.10, pp. 57–58, 1.13, pp. 64–65; 1.21–22, pp. 84–88, 1.29, pp. 108–09, 1.85, pp. 249–50, 1.88, pp. 257–60. 113. ​ The Cloud of Unknowing, 265. The first time, this assurance comes to Kempe in the form of a general princi­ple: “I take no notice of what a man has been, but I take heed of what he w ­ ill be” (BMK 1.21). The second time it is referred specifically to her: “I take no heed of what you have been but what you would be” (I take non hed what þu hast be but what þu woldist be) (BMK 1.36). 114. ​BMK 1.54 (Windeatt, 169–70), 1.84, pp. 243–47, 1.85, pp. 247–48, 1.86, pp. 250–55. 115. ​BMK 1.54. 116. ​BMK 1.26, p. 98, 1.30, p. 111, 1.30, p. 112, 1.39, p. 133, 1.42, p. 137, 1.42, p. 138, 1.44, p. 143, 1.45, p. 147, 1.84, p. 243, 2.3, pp. 273–74, 2.5, p. 277. 117. ​BMK 1.15. 118. ​BMK 2.5. 119. ​Birgitta of Sweden, Life and Selected Revelations, ed. Marguerite Tjader Harris, trans. Albert Ryle Kezel (New York: Paulist, 1990), 7; prologue, p. 159; 7.31, pp. 217–18.



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she needed: “Would I, God, who instruct you, truly be like someone who does not know the f­ uture or like someone powerless who fears all ­things? Not in the least! But I am wisdom itself and power itself, and I foreknow all and can do all,” and so she should trust in him.120 The voice is one of reassurance, as for Kempe, but it is less soothing than imperious. Kempe’s profuse weeping, which often becomes a source of annoyance to ­those around her, is itself paradoxically a subject for reassurance. Christ assures her that her crying is pleasing to him, or providential, or that it w ­ ill be eased. When her weeping has become so extreme that ­people are wondering about her, and she is kept from attending sermons, she asks Christ to stop the flow of tears.121 He addresses her with a discourse on the five “tokens” he affords her, the signs that he is working in and upon her. Even her tears are evidence of his power. He governs the planets, thunder and lightning, ­g reat winds, and earthquakes, and with the power of his divinity (“wyth þe myth of my Godheed”) he comes into her soul, working in her as powerfully and as disruptively as he works in the world of nature. Small won­der if she finds herself overwhelmed. Yet he also sends rainfall, sometimes plentiful and sometimes gentle, and so too he brings her sometimes ­g reat outbursts of crying and sometimes gentle weeping. With striking regularity, Christ addresses Kempe as “­daughter,” sometimes in each sentence over the course of a long monologue. His ­mother and o ­ thers 122 also use this form of address, as do some of her earthly supporters. At one juncture Christ explains how she can in dif­fer­ent ways be his d­ aughter, ­mother, ­sister, and wife,123 but throughout the text he insistently refers to her as “­daughter.” The term is clearly meant as endearment but also an acknowledgement of her vulnerability and dependence, and as assurance of support, consonant with the recurring emphasis on reassurance in the face of insecurity. Christ gives that assurance not only for her but for o ­ thers she cares for: he pledges, for example, that certain individuals ­will not die. When her beloved Master Aleyn is ill and in danger of death, in manifest panic she runs into church and kneels before the reserved sacrament, praying that he not die ­until she is able to speak with him, which has been forbidden. She is answered “in her soul” that he ­will not die before she is given permission to speak with him and he with her, and indeed he does recover and receive authorization from his 120. ​Birgitta, Life and Selected Revelations, 7; prologue, p. 159; 7.6, p. 168; 7.9, p. 171; 7.16.12–15, p. 192. 121. ​BMK 1.78 (Windeatt, 225); 1.77, pp. 221–24; 1.63, p. 194. 122. ​BMK 1.5, but see 1.18, “­sister.” 123. ​BMK 1.14 (Windeatt, 66).

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provincial to speak with her.124 Assurance of her own longevity is, however, at best a mixed blessing for her. While she is at mass, lamenting that her own death is long delayed, and asking Christ how long she ­will have to yearn for his presence, he answers in her soul that she w ­ ill live fifteen more years.125 She says this w ­ ill seem like thousands of years. He replies that she must remember his ­mother, who lived fifteen years a­ fter his death, and also Saint John the Evangelist and Mary Magdalene, both of whom loved him and had to live on earth beyond his death. She wishes she could be as sure of his love as Mary Magdalene was, and he answers that he loves her as well as he loved the Magdalene. Christ does also address Kempe with words of instruction and sometimes of reproach, but it is only rarely meant as chastisement specifically for her. Mostly he declares vengeance for ­others, warns of their imminent death and suffering in purgatory, or warns of a storm, a tribulation, or a plague.126 When the locutions pertained directly to Margery herself they are overwhelmingly words of reassurance, almost always relevant to her concrete situation at the moment, rarely dogmatic or abstract. The Dutch nun Alijt Bake (1415–1455) is known from her mystical writings, centered largely on the Passion of Christ, but also for an autobiography from which the second of two parts survives. As a young ­woman she joined the Augustinian convent at Ghent known as the Galilea, and when she was still young she assumed the role of prioress and set out to reform her monastery. She considered transferring to a congregation of Poor Clares, which was in the same city and was ­under the authority of Colette of Corbie (1381–1447), but in the end she remained at the Galilea. The surviving part of her autobiography speaks of her being guided by the voice of Christ within herself.127 He manifested to 124. ​BMK 1.23 (Windeatt, 89–90), 1.23, p. 89, 1.23, p. 89, 1.44, p. 142, 1.56, p. 176, 1.70, p. 209, 1.76, p. 220, 1.84, pp. 243–44; 1.70, pp. 209–20. 125. ​BMK 1.74 (Windeatt, 216). 126. ​BMK 1.1, p. 42; 1.59, pp. 184–84; 1.20, pp. 83–84; 1.23, p. 89; 1.42, p. 138; 1.50, pp. 157–58; 1.78, pp. 226. 127. ​B. Spaapen, ed., “Middeleeuwse Passiemystiek. III: De autobiografie van Alijt Bake” (the surviving second part of Bake’s autobiography, Dat ander boecxken van mijn beghin ende voortganck); modern Dutch translation in Alijt Bake, Tot in de peilloze diepte van God De vrouw die moest zwijgen over haar mystieke weg, intro. D. Th. M. van Dijk, trans. M. K. A. van den Berg (Kampen: Kok, and Nijmegen: Titus Brandsma Instituut, 1997). See also Wybren Scheepsma, “Mysticism and Modern Devotion: Alijt Bake’s (1415–1455) Lessons in the Mystical Way of Living,” in Spirituality Renewed: Studies on Significant Representatives of the Modern Devotion, ed. Hein Bloomestijn, Charles Caspers, and Rijcklof Hofman (Leuven: Peeters, 2003), 157–67; Wybren Scheepsma, ed., “Van die memorie der passien ons Heren van Alijt Bake,” Ons Geestelijk Erf 68 (1994): 106–28; and Anne Bollmann, “Close Enough to Touch: Tension between Inner Devotion and Communal Piety in the Congregations of S­ isters of the Devotio Moderna,” in Inwardness, Individualization, and Religious Agency in the Late Medieval Low Countries: Studies in the “Devotio Moderna” and Its Contexts, ed. Rijcklof Hofman, Charles Caspers, Peter Nissen, Mathilde van Dijk, and Johan Oosterman (Turnhout: Brepols, 2020), 151–54. John Van Engen’s translation of Bake’s life and other texts is forthcoming.



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her four manners of reliving his Passion, of which she was to take the fourth and highest, which involved a call to action as a reformer.128 Throughout her effort to experience Christ’s Passion she continued to have conversation with him.129 When Bake had concrete decisions to make she sought divine counsel indirectly, through confidants in whom she trusted. As a young ­woman considering her vocation, she had a kind of spiritual m ­ other with whom she was living and who gave her a sense of God’s ­will for her. Again, when she was trying to decide on her proper location, her urge was to consult with two close friends of hers, one of whom lived in a hospice where she took care of the sick, while the other lived alone and in poverty. One of them had counseled her e­ arlier, assuring her God would never leave her. Ultimately she was seeking a sign from God, but she sought ­human counsel in the pro­cess, and in the end it was a male friend, founder of their convent, who gave her helpful advice.130 Her divine guidance could also be mediated by her reading. She longed to read a l­ittle book that she had heard about, and when it came into her hands, she sensed an inner voice urging her to focus on one section; instead she read the entire book, but a­ fter giving it back to her source, she kept on thinking about what the voice had urged, ­until one Wednesday while she was spinning she again felt that inward encouragement to follow through on what she had ­earlier been urged to do.131 As she advanced in the spiritual life, her communication with Christ became more direct, more inward, and increasingly directed t­ oward reassurance in the face of outward adversity and feelings of unworthiness. He spoke to her, saying he would reveal something to her, then he entered into the deepest ground of her being to show her the truth that underlies all ­things. Feeling that she had attained unity with him, she increasingly spoke with him not outwardly in prayer but inwardly, begging him to teach her the road that would enable her to follow him as closely as pos­si­ble.132 He stood before her in spirit and asked why she was r­ unning from him when he longed for him, she was all his, he was all hers, and they would never again be separated.133 As she set out on the road to full imitation of Christ, she said she was afraid; while he acknowledged that 128. ​Sections 21–29 of the autobiography deal with the first two ways of Passion, 41–46 with two further ways, and 61–64 again with all four ways. 129. ​Scheepsma, “Mysticism and Modern Devotion,” 160, 164. 130. ​Spaapen, “Middeleeuwse Passiemystiek,” c. 19, pp. 245–46, and c. 16, pp. 238–41 (van Dijk and van den Berg, 50–51and 47–48). 131. ​Spaapen, “Middeleeuwse Passiemystiek,” c. 68, pp.  334–36 (van Dijk and van den Berg, 99–100). 132. ​Spaapen, “Middeleeuwse Passiemystiek,” c. 7, pp. 224–26, and c. 30, pp. 262–63 (van Dijk and van den Berg, 37–38 and 62). 133. ​Spaapen, “Middeleeuwse Passiemystiek,” c. 33, p. 268 (van Dijk and van den Berg, 66: “in haer ghemoet”).

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t­ here w ­ ere pitfalls before her, he assured her that he would always be with her to protect her. She was better suited to this than o ­ thers who had not fully turned inward but remained caught up in outward activities. When she asked Christ to teach her the path to imitation of his Passion, he said it was only for strong men. She replied by asking how ­those strong men got their strength—­ did he not give it to them, and could he not give it to her as well? He may have given them strong bodies, but he could make her a hundred times stronger than they in spirit. B ­ ecause she was strong in faith, he granted her request.134 The autobiography gives the sense of a w ­ oman also needing reassurance of her moral worth. Early in her life as a nun she begged Christ to show her how to imitate his suffering and death, and how she could be useful to the Church generally. He said she should confess all the sins she had committed in her life, purging herself so he could pour grace into her. Even if she had confessed ­earlier, before entering the convent, that was not enough. She offered to proclaim her sins on the streets and in the squares, to announce them to the p­ eople from the pulpit in church. When she attempted that, however, the response was mere mockery.135 She prayed to Christ in the manner of a kind of litany, repeating “O Lord” again and again, professing her shame at being unable to bear the affliction she faced.136 On another occasion, when she protested her sinfulness, Christ told her to look at him and at his heart. She remained fearful, but he invited her to gaze into him more inwardly, and within him she saw no cause of remorse, b­ ecause, as he explained, he had forgiven her all her sin, as if she never had given offense, and now she should suffer no more from her sins but forget them and turn confidently to him in friendship. She offered herself as a kind of sacrifice for the salvation of ­others, and in so ­doing lay outstretched on the ground as if nailed upon it.137 Wishing no longer to live, she begged Christ to kill her, and while her plea arose from love-­sickness and from conviction that in relinquishing her own life, she allowed Christ to live in her, still the tone is one of desperation: I had no idea what I should do. I could hold myself back. Then I cried day and night, but especially during mass, when our Lord was pre­sent, “O Lord, kill me, kill me and let me no longer live. I do not wish to live lon134. ​Spaapen, “Middeleeuwse Passiemystiek,” c. 56, pp. 293–95, and c. 59, pp. 298–99 (van Dijk and van den Berg, 85–86 and 88–89). Cf. “The ‘­Sister Catherine’ Treatise,” sect. 3, trans. Elvira Borgstädt, in Meister Eckhart: Teacher and Preacher, ed. Bernard McGinn (New York: Paulist, 1986), 351. 135. ​Spaapen, “Middeleeuwse Passiemystiek,” c. 38, pp. 273–74 (van Dijk and van den Berg, 69– 70); Scheepsma, “Mysticism and Modern Devotion,” 164. 136. ​Spaapen, “Middeleeuwse Passiemystiek,” c. 61, p. 322 (van Dijk and van den Berg, 91). 137. ​Spaapen, “Middeleeuwse Passiemystiek,” c. 34–35, pp. 268–70 (van Dijk and van den Berg, 66–68); cf. Spaapen, “Middeleeuwse Passiemystiek,” c. 31, p. 264 (van Dijk and van den Berg, 63).



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ger. I cannot live longer. Death, O death, come quickly. Come, come on, do not delay. Lord, Lord, I am ­dying, I am ­dying. I ­will lie ­here ­dying ­until you come and you rise up to live in me. O Lord, I have lived so long. When ­will you come to live in me? Come quickly and do not delay, for I die of love. Come, my Dearest, and let me die, so that you may live.138 In Bake’s case the straining for reassurance may seem unexpected, ­because in other passages she seems confident of her superiority in spiritual attainment to ­others around her, especially the prioress ­under whom she was professed. Taking a psychological approach, one might suppose her insistence on spiritual superiority compensated for deeper feelings of unworthiness and insecurity. Viewing the ­matter more from a text-­historical perspective, one could take the protestations of sinfulness and incapacity as humility topoi that have no direct bearing on her personality. In e­ ither case, Bake, like Kempe, bears out the observation that Christ comes when he is needed, that Christophany is often reported at moments when reassurance is begged for, usually in prayer. Anxiety can also lead to reliance on a habit that might be called  “intro­ locution.”139 A psychologically naturalistic narrative might depict a person as feeling some mea­sure of insecurity, speaking with herself, imagining what she would say in this or that potentially difficult conversation. Johannes Marien­ werder’s Latin Life of Dorothea of Montau portrays her as given to rehearsing conversations in advance. The wording is given to her by Christ; Christ rather than Dorothea herself anticipates and preconstructs what she w ­ ill say. Still, the impression is of a ­woman who spends considerable time absorbed in interactions for which she must be prepared, in conversations that she needs to have worked out in advance. Christ might give her words she should say to a par­tic­ u­lar individual, even to his ­mother Mary, but he also equipped her with formulas she could use for any potential interlocutor regarding her literacy, his own  role as her teacher, or the ­favors she received. If someone approached her while she was absorbed in contemplation, the interruption caused her to ­tremble, and Christ instructed her to explain why that happened: her spirit, ­illumined by divine light, would foresee the arrival when the person was still far off, and she would fear having her ­union with Christ abruptly severed. When 138. ​Spaapen, “Middeleeuwse Passiemystiek,” c. 66, p. 332 (van Dijk and van den Berg, 97–98). 139. ​What I am calling “introlocution” is much the same as what Ariel Glucklich, in Everyday Mysticism: A Contemplative Community at Work in the Desert (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017), 42– 43, refers to as “inner dialogue.” The category of “internal monologue” is used both in psy­chol­ogy and in literary study and sometimes is taken to imply pathology. See Charles Fernyhough, The Voices Within: The History and Science of How We Talk to Ourselves (London: Profile Books, 2016); and Alain Morin, Christina Duhnych, and Famira Racy, “Self-­Reported Inner Speech Use in University Students,” Applied Cognitive Psy­chol­ogy 32 (2018): 376–82.

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s­ omeone came to her seeking edifying instruction, Christ told her she should respond that she herself had just recently come to the spiritual path and had to guard against falling. He told her she should say to her “­children” that they should direct their conduct t­ oward eternal life as to a target.140 Particularly in Book 5 of the Latin Life, Christ gave Dorothea answers that she should use in response to anticipated questions from her confessor or ­others. Why did she wish to receive communion so much more often than an ordinary layperson? Why did she eat so l­ittle? Why did she not drink mead? Why did she not take ­water for washing her face or hands? Why was she pleased to sit all alone? Did she have enough light or air? Was she anxious? How could she flourish in her environment? What source of provisions did she have to guard against penury? Did she dislike meat? Did she have a fire to warm herself ? Did she want to make use of a saucer or goblet?141 ­These are not presented as questions she actually had to field, but as hy­po­thet­i­cal queries she might expect to receive, and for each of them Christ prepared her with an answer. Most fundamentally, if someone inquired at whose urging she had entered her cell, and from whom she had the funds to support herself, she was to reply, “I entered at the urging of one friend, who is eternal, and he has given me sufficient funds.”142 Christ even gave her words that she should speak to her own soul: “O my soul, take regard for yourself, take counsel and look about very intently, for before long I ­will not be able to come to your aid or do anything to provide you with solace.”143 No doubt she was much criticized, and some of her craving for justification was thus realistic, but the pro­cess could be circular: the more she felt the need for justification, and the more she indulged that need, the more sensitive she became not only to critique but to the potential of being judged by ­people whose eyes she supposed ­were peering and whose tongues she assumed w ­ ere wagging.

Occasions for Realization of Presence: Recollection of One’s Past Intuition and perception of Christ’s presence might also come at times of retrospection, when a person was looking back and seeking meaning in e­arlier stages of life, and when the divine agent pre­sent in the past was sensed pre­sent 140. ​VDM 1.1.c, pp. 30–31; 5.15.c, 5.39.f; 1.2.g., p. 33; 1.2.k, p. 35; 4.36.d, p. 204; 4.19.l, p. 178; 5.15.m, p. 236; 5.32.d, p. 263. 141. ​VDM 5.6.k, p. 220; 5.20.d, p. 243; 5.20.e, p. 243; 5.22.c, p. 246; 5.8.e, pp. 223–24; 5.8.f, p. 224; 5.8.g, p. 224; 5.8.h, p. 224; 5.9.f, p. 226; 5.21.a, p. 244; 5.22.d, p. 246; 5.22.f, p. 246; cf. LDM 3.5, pp. 153–55. 142. ​VDM 5.26.b, p. 253. 143. ​VDM 5.34.c, p. 266.



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also at the moment of reflection. Christ brought Margery Kempe’s sins to mind and caused her to confess them.144 Adelheid Langmann had revelations from Christ in which he interpreted her life in retrospect. He explained to her how he had helped her when she entered the convent. He told her how he had led her through the convent and on through the choirs of angels, eliciting the admiration of all. More than that, he told her more than once how she had been favored in eternity, before creation, and he reminded her how, as she herself was sent to earth, her soul looked back into his divinity before taking the plunge. In ­these passages Langmann’s boldness and daring come markedly to the fore, setting out a Neoplatonic view of God and the eternal archetype of one’s ideal self.145 Recollection could also have the force of revelation. The revelations given to Dorothea are in two senses remembered: on the one hand ­there is strong emphasis on the need for her to remember what she is told now in the pre­ sent; on the other, the revelations bring recovery of lost memory of her e­ arlier life, often from the distant past. Christ sent her the Holy Spirit to refresh her memory of what she had forgotten.146 From the time she came to Marien­ werder, he brought ­things back to her memory, and he had her convey them to the confessor for recording, all of which would other­wise have passed into oblivion.147 Dorothea is in a sense like Saint Augustine, finding God deep within the soul, chiefly in the innermost faculty of memory, whose contents form the m ­ atter of his narrative. As with Augustine, recollection is meant to lead to retelling: memory leads to memorialization. In Dorothea’s case the pro­ cess of both entrusting to memory and recovering lost memory is cause for won­der, ­because of the exceptional divine aid given to her in t­ hese pro­cesses, and the disclosure of what has been remembered is problematized by Dorothea’s reticence. Both the remembering and the retelling are depicted as complicated pro­cesses. Two years before she died, Dorothea spoke with a man who, as she knew, had committed sexual sins many years before. Christ says of that man that he “should have been strong and virile in his temptations, just as you ­were when you w ­ ere still young.” Immediately she remembers an incident she had entirely forgotten. She had known a cleric who seemed spiritual and good and who wanted to meet with her for prayer and pious conversation, but “the Ancient ­Enemy” suggested to him a way of compromising her chastity when they w ­ ere alone. He came in one day, took off his cloak, and ­gently touched her on the 144. ​BMK 1.5. 145. ​Strauch, Die Offenbarungen, 5–6, 35. 146. ​VDM 1.6.g, p. 42. 147. ​VDM 5.46.c, pp. 283–84.

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neck. Outraged, she immediately ­rose up, wet from perspiring in horror at his lascivious touch, and without speaking a word withdrew from him and no longer counted him a friend. On a l­ater occasion, she was sitting in a corner preoccupied with some work, and he came along without her seeing him and placed his hand beneath her garments on her bare back, again tempting her to give in to his desires. Rising up, she grabbed a large stick or staff and beat him vigorously, causing him to take flight and desist from tempting her.148 How she could have forgotten this incident is not clear, but the recovery of memory illustrates dramatically a pro­cess that for Dorothea was routine. She knew of her early life ­because Christ recalled it to her mind, which meant that what she retold was preselected for hagiographic appropriation. Viewing the situation a bit differently, we might say that t­here w ­ ere incidents that she had not thought of for years, but now they came back to her—­linked to more recent experience and no doubt also to the stimulus of Marienwerder’s probing and recording, which served somewhat like psychoanalysis to open the deep store of memory—­and she ascribed their recollection to divine prompting. The vita depicts such recovery of memory as miraculous and thus exceptional, but it can be viewed as ordinary h ­ uman experience—or, to view the m ­ atter more subtly, divine influence might be seen working through an ordinary psychological pro­cess.

Psychological, Redactional, and Intratextual Transitions The schema proposed ­here of transition from presupposition to intuition and then to perception could be construed in more than one way. Most obviously, it could be seen as a psychological pro­cess that actually occurs in the mind of the person claiming to experience Christ’s presence. That pro­cesses of that sort do occur is a point that may seem so obvious that it does not need belaboring. False memory, often involving a transition from misleading intuition to false claims of perception, is a well-­known psychological phenomenon,149 but it may be prejudicial to speak of memory adaptation as necessarily false; a person may come to a more accurate account of experience on reflection, realizing that something at first vaguely intuited actually did occur. Yet reconstructing the psychological pro­cess of a par­tic­u­lar individual at a distance of 148. ​VDM 2.33.b-­d, p. 96: “baculum seu fostem magnum,” reading fustem. 149. ​Richard Ofshe and Ethan Watters, Making Monsters: False Memories, Psychotherapy, and Sexual Hysteria (New York: Scribner, 1994), 155–76 (“Two Cases of Hypnotic Story Creation”), but see also Karen A. Olio and William F. Cornell, “The Facade of Scientific Documentation: A Case Study of Richard Ofshe’s Analy­sis of the Paul Ingram Case,” Psy­chol­ogy, Public Policy, and Law 4 (1998): 1182–97.



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several centuries is impossible to do with any confidence, and ­whether we find this reconstruction plausible ­will depend largely on how far we are willing to trust our own intuitions in our historical understanding. A second possibility is that t­ hese transitions emerged in the pro­cess of redaction. No doubt some rec­ords of revelation, especially in hagiography, ­were redacted to highlight the super­natural quality of the subjects’ experience. Writers who took less interest in the exceptional and miraculous may have moved in the opposite direction, presenting more sober accounts where e­ arlier texts had stressed the super­natural (as, for example, Johannes Meyer did to some extent in editing the sister-­books).150 Scholars working specifically on any of t­ hese subjects or texts w ­ ill of course wish whenever pos­si­ble to establish whose voice is being heard, and w ­ ill want to work out the full range of ways the redactors modified their material, but this is a ­matter that does not lend itself easily to generalization. A third, intratextual approach focuses simply on the text as given, the “standard edition” if t­ here was one, the version most widely disseminated, if the text was disseminated appreciably at all. This approach may be grounded in a kind of agnosticism about conjecturally reconstructed layers of redaction. Or it may rest simply on a sense that it is the text that fi­nally emerged and was widely received that is most impor­tant for cultural history. If the texts as they stand show awareness of a transition from presupposition to intuition, from intuition to perception, that is a significant historical datum, evidence that this view of revelatory experience was available within the culture, w ­ hether or not it reflects the experience of any par­tic­u­lar subject. The more a study aims at broad synthesis, the more this third approach seems appropriate. It abstracts from the particularities of authorship, redaction, and transmission, it s­ ettles on a par­tic­u­lar version of each text, and it asks what a variety of texts cumulatively reveal about the ways revelation could be perceived. For our purposes what is most impor­tant is the fluidity that allows for a shift from one interpretive framework to another, from intuition to perception, or from scripted text to account of experience, no ­matter where precisely that shift occurred, ­whether in the mind of the subject or at the hand of a redactor.151 For the most part, then, this book follows the third, intratextual approach, but with some flexibility. T ­ hose of us who find the transitional model psychologically 150. ​Claire Taylor Jones, Ruling the Spirit: W ­ omen, Liturgy, and Dominican Reform in Late Medieval Germany (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), 59–64, suggests that the extent of Meyer’s revision has been overstated. 151. ​Cf. Bernard McGinn, “The Changing Shape of Late Medieval Mysticism,” Church History 65 (1996):205: “the immediate object of study is not mystical experience as such but the mystical text, both written and (increasingly in the late ­Middle Ages) visual” (emphasis in original).

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plausible ­will at times be open to the possibility that the texts are right when they suggest a transition from presupposition to intuition or from intuition to perception. The pro­cess that has verisimilitude for our sources may have verisimilitude for us as well.152 And ­there are times when the redactional hand is so heavy and so clear that it would be frivolous to deny it and pointless not to examine its impact, perhaps most especially when the text is hagiographic. Taking more than one perspective may be helpful, even necessary, but the primary perspective for this study is intratextual.

152. ​This is meant as a qualification to rather than disagreement with the argument of Michel de Certeau that mysticism should be seen as a modus loquendi and not a form of experience that can be interpreted phenomenologically; see Michel de Certeau, The Mystic Fable, trans. Michael  B. Smith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992–2015), and Hollywood, The Soul as Virgin Wife, 21.

Conclusion to Part I

At this point it may be helpful to give a provisional answer to the question how ordinary and exceptional piety related to each other when they involve devotion to Christ. What has emerged so far could be called a twofold ambiguity. First, when we ask how Christ himself was understood (the question of “who”), the most basic answer is that the divinity of his person was fundamental to all, largely b­ ecause it was his divinity that made him ubiquitously pre­sent and accessible, even when attention was directed to the suffering made pos­si­ble by his assumed h ­ uman nature. This was, then, a point of convergence between ordinary and exceptional piety, which ­were both grounded in ­these theological assumptions. Yet the very effort to tell about Christ’s presence and narrate an ongoing relationship with him, involving frequent dialogue and sometimes visions, inevitably made his interlocutors appear specially privileged. ­There was ­little incentive for narrating commonplace experience, but much incentive for representing spiritual experience as remarkable. Even a conception of Christ that was widely shared thus became, in the telling, a basis for distinction between ordinary and singular believers. Second, when we ask how p­ eople thought about their contact and communication with this ever-­present Christ (the question of “how”), we begin with the recognition that all moderately pious Christians assumed he could hear and answer their prayers, and a presupposition of that sort can readily predispose a person to some intuition, however vague, of presence 129

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and response. Late medieval writers sometimes spoke about such intuition. But hagiography and lit­er­a­ture of revelation did not stop at that point on the spectrum; they portrayed their subjects as hearing the voice of Christ and sometimes seeing him. W ­ hether the subjects experienced Christ in this way at the time, or remembered it so at a l­ ater point, or w ­ ere merely recorded this way in the texts that come down to us is a question we ultimately cannot resolve. If we cannot say exactly what happened in the experience of Gertrude, Margery Kempe, and the rest, we can see how late medieval writers represented the experience of Christ’s presence, and we find them aware of a subtle transition from presupposition to intuition and then to perception. The ends of the spectrum might be far apart, but still it was a spectrum rather than a fundamental divide. While the repre­sen­ta­tion of Christ himself tended to widen the gap between ordinary and exceptional experience of his presence, discussion of how he was perceived tended in some mea­sure to narrow that gap.

Pa rt T w o

Contexts and Aspects of Manifestation

C h a p te r   4

Prayer, Meditation, and Presence

­ hose who reported experiencing the presence T of Christ, who spoke of contact and conversation with him, also prayed to him and at least sometimes meditated on his life and death. The experience of contact with Christ in prayer affords perhaps the most impor­tant link between ordinary and exceptional piety: it was accessible in princi­ple to all, and the prayer practice of the saints was often conventional, but it also provided a context for a sense of Christ’s presence that went beyond the ordinary. While the gap between ordinary and exceptional religion may elsewhere seem relatively wide, ­here ­there is clearer evidence of the shared practices and assumptions in which intuitions and perceptions are grounded. Our sources refer to prayer and meditation as the occasion sometimes for an intuitive sense of Christ’s presence, sometimes for more explicit revelation. The person in prayer might see herself as initiating a dialogue that expected response from Christ, w ­ hether immediately or in the course of time. Revelations often came during prayer or meditation in the case of Birgitta of Sweden,1 and they did at times to Umiltà of Faenza (1226–1310).2 The pro­cess can be 1. ​The vita is given in Birgitta of Sweden, Life and Selected Revelations, ed. Marguerite Tjader Harris, trans. Albert Ryle Kezel (New York and Mahwah: Paulist, 1990), 7.19, pp. 196–99; 7.27.1, p. 207. 2. ​St. Umiltà of Faenza, Sermons, no. 4 and 6, trans. Richard J. Pioli, in Medieval ­Women’s Visionary Lit­er­a­ture, ed. Elizabeth Alvilda Petroff (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 250–52.

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seen with Mechthild of Hackeborn,3 but more often with Gertrude of Helfta. ­People other than Gertrude prayed on her behalf and received replies in which Christ praised Gertrude,4 while Gertrude herself prayed and heard a reply. A chapter might indicate an occasion on which Gertrude addressed Christ, opening herself to the possibility of response, in some cases even expecting response, ­whether intuited or perceived. Response to prayer might take the form of a vision, which then might be explicated in dialogue. It was prayer that led Gertrude to see a stream flowing from Christ’s heart,5 and in prayers she might see the person she was praying for enveloped in Christ’s light.6 The vision that ensued might not be simply positive or negative: it could be calculated to send a mixed message of reassurance and critique. When Gertrude prayed on one occasion she was given a vision of Christ’s body as the mystical body of the Church, royally arrayed on one side but naked and festering on the other, symbolizing the virtuous and sinful members of the Church.7 Short of such dramatic revelatory experience, Christ was often the center of attention in private devotional prayer. A painting of “good and bad prayer” from around 1500 on the vaulting of a village church at Fanefjord in Denmark illustrates conventions of ordinary Christocentric piety (figure 3). Christ himself appears in the center as the Man of Sorrows. To the left a wealthy man prays with a tasseled rosary, but lines of attention leading from his head show that even as he prays, he can think only of his worldly goods, his clothes and ­horse, his money chest and vats of beer. On the right a poor man with ragged sleeves and socks holds simpler prayer beads in his hands, with lines of attention directed to the wounds of Christ, and his prayer is that of the publican, “God have mercy on me, a sinner.” By implication the rich man is identified with the Pharisee of the parable (Luke 18:9–14), hypocritical ­here ­because he pretends to focus on Christ but his lines of attention are twisted backward to what he claims to set aside. The poor man’s lines of attention, directed as they are to Christ’s wounds, call to mind the lines sometimes shown linking Francis of Assisi with the crucified seraph in scenes of the stigmatization. We need not assume that ­either man is enjoying a vision, but the Christ presented to them as an object of attention and addressed as God comes as if in a vision, placing himself on display in the manner typical of the Man

3. ​LSG 1.8 (Newman, 51); LSG 1.31 (Newman, 110). 4. ​LDP 1.2.4 (Barratt, 47); LDP 1.2.5, pp. 47–48. 5. ​LDP 3.72.1–2 (Barratt, 199–200); cf. LDP 3.73.3–6, pp. 203–5. 6. ​LDP 3.72.6 (Barratt, 201); cf. LDP 3.73.9, pp. 206–7, LDP 3.73.10–11, pp. 207–8. 7. ​LDP 3.74 (Barratt, 210–13).



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Figure 3.  Good Prayer and Bad Prayer, painting from the vaulting of the parish church at Fanefjord, Denmark, ca. 1500. Photo by author.

of Sorrows.8 Christ does not enter into the lives of e­ ither man as a character interacting intimately with him; he stands on the threshold between eternity and time, viewed by the late medieval devout and not-­so-­devout, without anyone crossing over the divide. Daily life is depicted not as a setting for sacred drama but as distraction. Both of the praying men in this painting might be thought of as ordinary late medieval Christians, but in fact they are stock figures, opposing types put on display alongside Christ. The person who remains more truly ordinary is the churchgoer who encountered this triad as a subject for reflection, perhaps also as a theme to be expounded by a preacher. That same churchgoer might on some other occasion hear of a nun who experiences Christ stepping across the threshold and interacting with her in her daily life. If so, that ordinary Christian would be hearing of something that is exceptional, to be sure, yet not entirely unrelated to the image of a pious man kneeling in prayer and imagining the Man of Sorrows standing before him.

8. ​Annett Scavenius, Elmelundemesteren i Fanefjord Kirke (Copenhagen: Forlaget Vandkunsten, 2010), 94–95. For the general iconographic motif, based on Matthew 6:19–21, 24, see Achim Timmermann, “Good and Bad Prayers, before Albertus Pictor: Prolegomena to the History of a Late Medieval Image,” Baltic Journal of Art History 5 (2013): 131–78 (with notes on the Fanefjord example on 162).

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Devotional Prayer to Christ: Proclamation of Dogma, Penance for Sin, and Lament for Absence That Christians should pray to Christ cannot be simply taken for granted. The model prayer Jesus himself gave was addressed to the ­Father, not to himself (Matthew 6:9–13). Elsewhere he assured his disciples that what they asked the ­Father in his name would be given them ( John 14:13), but still the prayer was to the F ­ ather. Rarely did Christ instruct his disciples that they should pray to him ( John 14:14). Only three short texts in the New Testament indicate a tradition of praying to Christ (I Corinthians 16:22, Revelation 22:30, Acts 7:59). For Origen it is the ­Father, the princi­ple of the divine Trinity, to whom prayer and worship are addressed.9 In par­tic­u­lar the public prayer of liturgy has always been addressed primarily to the F ­ ather and not the Son. Liturgy may be directed through the Son, and frequently in the Holy Spirit, but it is addressed to the F ­ ather. In the canon or eucharistic prayer the priest quotes Christ’s words of institution at the Last Supper, but addresses the ­Father as Christ did. Christ at the Last Supper did not pray to himself, and the priest in persona Christi does not address him ­either. This tradition was ratified by the Council of Carthage in 397, which insisted that prayer “at the altar” must be addressed to the ­Father, not the Son.10 The general restriction of liturgical prayer to the ­Father is paralleled, however, by a longstanding tradition of addressing private devotional prayers to Christ. ­These prayers are often marked as devotional not only by their address but by the use of the first person singular, a clear indication that they ­were meant for private rather than for public liturgical use. Early prayers addressed to Christ are sometimes marked by a tone of dogmatic proclamation, by a cele­ 9. ​A. Hamman, ed., Early Christian Prayers, trans. Walter Mitchell (Chicago: Regnery; London: Longmans, Green, 1961), 43 n1. 10. ​Canons of the Council of Carthage, 397, c. 21, Patrologia latina, vol. 56 (Paris: Migne, 1865), cols. 425–26: “Ut nemo in precibus vel Patrem pro Filio vel Filium pro Patre nominet; et cum altari assistitur, semper ad Patrem dirigatur oratio. Et quicunque sibi preces aliunde describit, non eis utatur, nisi prius eas cum instructioribus fratribus contulerit.” See also Anselm, The Prayers and Meditations of St Anselm, with the Proslogion, trans. S­ ister Benedicta Ward (Harmonds­worth: Penguin, 1973), 39. Larry W. Hurtado, Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Chris­tian­ity (­Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003), 618: “In the patterns of liturgical prayer preserved in texts of proto-­orthodox circles, direct prayer to Jesus is not common. . . . ​By contrast, in apocryphal Christian writings . . . ​direct prayer to Jesus is much more frequent, and in fact, is typical, including public/liturgical prayers. Direct prayer to Jesus may have been more frequent in ‘popu­lar’ Christian piety, as distinguished from the devotional pattern promoted in liturgical settings in proto-­orthodox circles.” Hurtado quotes ­earlier scholars as noting that “Christian hymnody of the first two centuries was almost entirely concerned with Jesus” (609), but then he quotes Ignatius of Antioch as urging song “through Jesus Christ to the ­Father” or “to the ­Father in Jesus Christ” (610).



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bration of the mysteries enshrined in dogma. Several prayers from late antiquity celebrate Christ’s eminence and power, and when they salute him as savior, he is clearly a mighty savior, not an abject victim. He may be a savior who has poured his blood (“a God’s blood”) over the earth, but he does so as a champion entering ­battle with the invisible foes of humankind. He is a divine teacher and savior: “You who bridle colts untamed, who wing unerring birds in flight, who steer ships along their course and shepherd the royal lambs.” The luster that radiates from him outshines the stars. He is leader of the dance and lord of all powers, as the second greatness flowing from that of the ­Father, as the upholder of the world’s foundations.11 An early medieval prayer emphasizes the intimate proximity of Christ to all ­things generally but to the praying subject in par­tic­ul­ar: “You are all t­ hings to me, and all t­ hings are in you, and to me you are every­thing. . . . ​In you we are. In you we live. In you we move” (Acts 17:28).12 An eleventh-­century compilation of prayers acknowledges Christ’s work of redemption without emphasizing the suffering that entailed, but more often it focuses on the Son as eternal God, as creator, and as the judge on the last day. One prayer in this compilation addresses Christ as “you who are invisible yet became vis­ib­ le for us, you who are without suffering [impassibilis] yet suffered for us, you who are immortal yet deigned to die for us,” and proceeds to a plea for ­favor at the Last Judgment.13 If prayer to Christ was often dogmatic and celebratory, it could also be penitential. B ­ ecause it was sin that caused Christ to suffer, and b­ ecause he would return as the judge of sinners, prayers addressed to him often express grief and implore forgiveness. Gregory of Nazianzen (329–390) wrote prayers to Christ expressing his personal sense of weariness and the burden of his sin.14 Ephraim the Syrian (306–373) too prayed to Christ as the savior who died “for me, a sinner, unworthy of such a blessing.”15 Early medieval books of private devotion include several prayers addressed to Christ, most of them explic­itly penitential in character.16 In an extended prayer in the form of a litany, nearly ­every verse begins with the words, “Have mercy, O Lord, have mercy, O Christ,” followed by petitions for guidance and virtue, for penitence and remission of sins, for deliverance from tribulation and uncleanness, for release from lust and from the Dev­il’s snares.17 Even the exceptional moments in the 11. ​Hamman, Early Christian Prayers, 32–33, no. 44; 38–39, nos. 50–51; 73–76, no. 106. 12. ​D. A. Wilmart, Precum libelli quattuor aevi Karolini, nunc primum publici iuris facti cum aliorum indicibus (Rome: Ephemerides Liturgicae, 1940), 59: “Tu mihi omnia et omnia in te, tu mihi totum.” 13. ​André Wilmart, “Le manuel de prières de Saint Jean Gualbert,” Revue Bénédictine 48 (1936): 277. 14. ​Hamman, Early Christian Prayers, 165–66, nos. 252–54. 15. ​Hamman, Early Christian Prayers, 180–81, no. 269. 16. ​Wilmart, Precum libelli quattuor aevi Karolini, 10–11, 16, 57, 58, 140, 141, 162. 17. ​Wilmart, Precum libelli quattuor aevi Karolini, 123.

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public liturgy when Christ is addressed are almost all in large mea­sure penitential: the Kyrie, the petition to Christ as Lamb of God in the Gloria, the Agnus Dei and the priest’s private prayers before and ­after communion, protesting his unworthiness to receive the sacrament, prayers that then became integrated into the liturgy.18 Penitential prayers sometimes refer to specific moments in Christ’s Passion as occasions for reflection on sin and repentance.19 A set of Carolingian hymns and collects keyed to the canonical hours recalls the Passion of Christ at terce, sext, and none with prayers addressed to him. Recalling that at the third hour he was led t­ oward his crucifixion, one prayer asks for remission of sins. When he r­ ose to the tree of the cross at the sixth hour, the world was plunged into darkness; the prayer asks him to shed light upon souls and bodies. At the ninth hour he promised the joys of paradise to the confessing thief, and he is asked to grant t­ hose joys now to t­ hose who confess their sins. Some of the prayers in the collection are meant to be recited before a cross or crucifix. One such prayer pleads to Christ, “Have mercy on me, borne down as I am by the weight of sins,” before ­going on to adore the cross and praise the resurrection. B ­ ecause the suffering Christ is also the one who w ­ ill return in 20 judgment, compassion can be linked to pleas for mercy. A third theme that became prominent in meditations at least from the eleventh c­ entury, alongside dogmatic assertion and penitence, was regret that one was not a con­temporary of Christ, witnessing the events of the gospel and especially the Passion. The point h ­ ere is not precisely the absence of Christ—he must in any case be pre­sent to hear the words of the one praying or meditating—­but rather one’s own absence from the historical Christ. When Margaret of Cortona wished to have lived at the time of Christ,21 she was by no means the first to express this sentiment. Anselm of Canterbury wrote prayers and meditations addressed largely to Christ as redeemer, including one particularly eloquent prayer asking him to “turn my lukewarmness into a fervent love of you,” so that “by remembering and meditating on the good ­things you have done I may be enkindled with your love.” Anselm thirsts and hungers for Christ, desires and sighs for him, covets him, and imagines himself as a weeping orphan, bereft of his kindly f­ather. But chiefly he calls to 18. ​Josef A. Jungmann, The Mass of the Roman Rite: Its Origin and Development (Missarum sollemnia), trans. Francis A. Brunner (New York: Benziger, 1955), 2:344–49. 19. ​Edward Phillips, “Prayer in the First Four Centuries A.D.,” in A History of Prayer: The First to the Fifteenth ­Century, ed. Roy Hammerling (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 43. 20. ​Wilmart, Precum libelli quattuor aevi Karolini, 98; cf. 13–14, 25–30, 33–36, 142. See also Susan Boynton, “Libelli precum in the Central M ­ iddle Ages,” in A History of Prayer: The First to the Fifteenth ­Century, ed. Roy Hammerling (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 255–318. 21. ​VMC 4.12 (Renna, 92).



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mind the life of Christ, and in ­doing so, he reminds himself that he was not ­there to behold Jesus in the flesh conversing with mortals. “Alas that I did not deserve to be amazed in the presence of a love marvelous and beyond our grasp.” Before the ascension into heaven he and Christ did not have a chance to bid farewell to each other. “What ­shall I say? What ­shall I do? Whither ­shall I go? Where ­shall I seek him? Where and when ­shall I find him?”22 Lamentation at one’s absence from the historical Christ remained firmly established in ­later medieval devotion. Richard Rolle (ca. 1300–1349) grieved that he was not pre­sent to the events, seeing only in his imagination what he would have seen had he been ­there as witness to the gospel events.23 The Catalan friar Francesc Eiximenis (1330–1409) authored a set of meditations on the life of Christ in vari­ous modes, often laudatory and frequently penitential, but he too turns eventually to ponder the life of Christ he was not privileged to experience: Oh, why was I not among his blessed apostles and disciples, for the sight of Jesus would have inebriated me and satisfied me to the full with love! I would have occupied myself always in kissing his blessed feet, I would have called out constantly a­ fter him, saying to all p­ eople: “Behold the Lord your God! He it is whom God the ­Father has eternally begotten as equal to himself in nature, the one the prophets foretold, the one who works such wondrous deeds among you. He is your salvation! Come forth to him, then, and be enlightened, lest in the end your countenances be confounded!” Unable to play that role, Eiximenis wishes at least to die for Christ, to be joined quickly to him, to be satisfied with the full draught of him.24

­Later Medieval ­Women’s Prayers to Christ The lives of saints, mystics, and visionaries often refer to their prayer practices, and what often becomes clear is how dedicated they w ­ ere to perfectly ordinary prayer. Like every­one ­else, in princi­ple, they prayed the Lord’s Prayer and the Angelic Salutation.25 They might say ­these prayers in exceptional numbers, 22. ​Anselm, Prayers and Meditations, 93–99. 23. ​Richard Rolle, The En­glish Writings, trans. and ed. Rosamund S. Allen (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist, 1989), 91–104, 112–15, 122, 141–42, 173, 192. 24. ​Francesc Eiximenis, Psalterium alias laudatorium Papae Benedicto XIII dedicatum, ed. Curt J. Wittlin (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1988), 156–57. 25. ​E.g., VCH c. 6 (trans., 6–7).

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sometimes hundreds at a time, but h ­ ere too they w ­ ere not all that dif­fer­ent from ordinary pious ­people counting on their prayer beads. They also wrote new prayers that ­were accessible enough that they could be shared with ­others, as they ­were meant to be. Three of the figures we have been discussing—­Mechthild of Magdeburg, Gertrude of Helfta, and Dorothea of Montau—­are said to have composed, used, and prescribed formal prayers to Christ. All three of them are represented as taking an interest in other ­people’s piety, and they themselves are set forward as models of prayer for ­others to emulate. ­Whether or not ­these formal prayers ­were the ones most likely to have led ­these ­women to a lively sense of Christ’s presence, they do help to flesh out our sense of their Christocentric devotion. Mechthild of Magdeburg prescribed prayer formulas for an unnamed ­woman to use in addressing Christ: Dear intimate friend, Jesus, this hour belongs to you alone, to poor sinners, to Holy Chris­tian­ity, and to distressed souls, but not to me. All power and strength of my heart I give you t­oday, Lord, that you, my Love, to your own praise might come to their aid in accordance with my desire; and grant me thereafter, Lord, that I ­really know who I myself am. Then I ­shall r­ eally be downcast.26 In this prayer Mechthild seeks to cultivate in her friend a balance of effusive gratitude and praise with a sense of unworthiness, even shame. Something of the same balance occurs in another prayer that Mechthild gives for her own use: O dear Lord Jesus Christ, who are one eternal God with the eternal ­Father, remember me! I thank you, Lord, for your vis­i­ble ­favor with which you constantly touch me, which cuts through all my bones, all my veins, and all my flesh. Whenever I can repay you for it, Lord, with holy thankfulness, I am secure; other­wise, I am not. . . . ​But when you touch me with your most sublime sweetness that permeates my body and my soul utterly, then I fear that I can draw to myself all too much of your divine plea­sure. For I am unworthy of it on earth. And so I pray to you at times more for other ­people than for myself.27 As we have seen, prayer to Christ was often penitential b­ ecause it envisaged Christ enthroned at the Last Judgment and it begged for his mercy. ­Here the penitential mode is more that of a lover who feels inadequate before the beloved and unworthy of the intimacy that is offered. 26. ​FLG 5.11, pp. 344–45 (Tobin, 190). 27. ​FLG 7.50, pp. 630–31 (Tobin, 320).



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Apart from the prayers contained in The Herald, a g­ reat many prayers are associated with Gertrude of Helfta, and a compilation of “spiritual exercises” associated with Gertrude provides models of meditation for the nuns of Helfta. One of them, the “dedication of the self,” is based in large mea­sure on the liturgical ceremony for consecration of virgins but is recast in a meditative form. The opening sections take the form of dialogical meditation: Christ speaks to the soul, Love addresses the soul, the soul offers itself to God, Christ’s voice offers to espouse the soul and ennoble her with the purple of his blood and the gold of his ­bitter death, and in return she offers him praise. This is not a revelation to any par­tic­u­lar individual, but it is the sort of dialogical meditation that might have schooled a nun to address Christ with the expectation of response such as the Herald amply illustrated. Dorothea of Montau too had a prayer meant for her to say and to teach her friends: Lord Jesus Christ, creator of heaven and earth, if I could praise you as much, love you as much, honor you as much, exalt you as much, and bless you as much as your beloved m ­ other the virgin Mary and all your beloved saints who are in eternal life, it would still not suffice to praise you perfectly, love you perfectly, honor you perfectly, exalt you perfectly, or bless you perfectly. Therefore, my beloved Lord, may you praise yourself, honor yourself, exalt yourself, and bless yourself, my most beloved Lord. My most beloved Lord, may you give yourself thanks. My most beloved Lord and my God, may you yourself speak your praise, glory, and honor!28 What­ever assumptions we make about the a­ ctual authorship of this prayer,29 it is an eloquent specimen both of Christocentric piety and of a tendency to relinquish one’s own agency, yielding to that of Christ, and it is a version of a much broader tendency in mystical theology to embrace one’s own passivity and to assign agency to God.30 Nothing in ­these prayers—or in other prayers commonly used by ­these ­women—is particularly out of the ordinary. Nothing would seem out of place in the exercises of any moderately pious late medieval Christian.

28. ​VDM 5.44.e, p. 281; cf. LDM 3.19, pp. 171–72. 29. ​Dorothea herself does not typically speak in such periodic phrasing, but it is typical of what Marienwerder ascribes to Christ through Dorothea. 30. ​See Richard Kieckhefer, “The Notion of Passivity in the Sermons of John Tauler,” Recherches de théologie ancienne et médiévale 48 (1981): 198–211.

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Meditations on the Life of Christ One of the most impor­tant devotional forms of the high and late medieval West, the composed meditation, cannot always be rigidly distinguished from a prayer but is in princi­ple distinct. A prayer necessarily addresses a super­ natural being, ­whether God as the Trinity or the indistinct deity, or Christ in par­tic­u­lar, or a saint or angel whose intercession before God is requested. A meditation may also address God, but it may shift to addressing the soul of the individual in meditation, perhaps dwelling on the status or circumstances of the individual, her sinfulness or hopes of salvation, and often it involves extended reflection on events of the gospel. It tends to be more flexible than a prayer in its subject m ­ atter, its structure, and its sense of who is being addressed. Anselm of Canterbury in his meditations turns in alternation to Christ, to the Virgin, to his own soul, even to abstractions such as consolation, security, or joy.31 This flexibility, the shifting from one addressee to another, can give a meditation something of the character of a dialogue, although it is the addressee rather than the speaker who changes. Numerous devotional texts on the life and Passion of Christ, sometimes on the life of Christ and his m ­ other, w ­ ere penned in the long f­ourteenth ­century.32 Some of t­hese works ­were explic­itly couched as meditations. The Pseudo-­Bonaventuran Meditations on the Life of Christ are well known,33 as is Nicholas Love’s adaptation, his Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ.34 Some 31. ​Anselm, Prayers and Meditations of St Anselm, 227, 230–37; Benedicta Ward, “The Place of St.  Anselm in the Development of Christian Prayer,” Cistercian Studies 8 (1973): 72–81; Benedicta Ward, “The Prayers and Meditations of St. Anselm of Canterbury,” in A History of Prayer: The First to the Fifteenth ­Century, ed. Roy Hammerling (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 245–54. 32. ​For surveys see C.C. de Bruin, “Medieval Lives of Jesus as Guides for Meditation and Contemplation,” Nederlands Archief voor Kerkgeschiedenis n.s. 58 (1978): 129–55, 60 (1980): 162–81, 63 (1983): 129–73, and Philip  E. Webber,” Va­ri­e­ties of Popu­lar Piety Suggested by Netherlandic Vita Christi Prayer Cycles,” Ons geestelijk erf 64 (1990): 195–226. 33. ​Iohannes de Caulibus, Meditaciones vite Christi olim S. Bonaventure attributae, ed. M. Stallings-­ Taney (Corpus Christianorum, Continuatio Mediaevalis, 153) (Turnhout: Brepols, 1997); John of Caulibus, Meditations on the Life of Christ, trans. Francis X. Taney, Anne Miller, and C. Mary Stallings-­Taney (Asheville, NC: Pegasus, 2000); Isa Ragusa and Rosalie B. Green, ed. and trans., Meditations on the Life of Christ: An Illuminated Manuscript of the ­Fourteenth ­Century—­Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, MS. Ital. 115 (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1961). See also Michael Thomas, “Zum religionsgeschichtlichen Standort der ‘Meditationes Vitae Christi,’ ” Zeitschrift für Religions-­und Geistesgeschichte 24 (1972): 209–26; Robert Worth Frank  Jr., “Meditationes Vitae Christi: The Logistics of Access to Divinity,” in Hermeneutics and Medieval Culture, ed. Patrick J. Gallacher and Helen d’Amico (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989), 39–50; and Holly Flora, The Devout Belief of the Imagination: The Paris “Meditationes vitae Christi” and Female Franciscan Spirituality in Trecento Italy (Turnhout: Brepols, 2009). Sarah McNamer, Meditations on the Life of Christ: The Short Italian Text (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2018), is particularly impor­tant on the genesis of the text. 34. ​Nicholas Love, Nicholas Love’s Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ: A Critical Edition, ed. Michael G. Sargent (New York: Garland, 1992).



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­ ere versified, such as a ­Middle En­glish Metrical Life of Christ,35 in which case w the meditative purpose was not lost but might be less obvious. The sermons that Vincent Ferrer (1350–1419) preached on the life of Christ, while entirely dif­fer­ent in form from devotional treatises, are essentially identical in content, and if read rather than delivered from the pulpit, they are difficult to distinguish from a devotional work.36 Johannes Nider (1380–1438) wrote a treatise called The Twenty-­Four Golden Harps, freely adapted from the work of the fourth-­century monk John Cassian. Like Cassian, he gives directives on how to pray, but he diverges from Cassian in emphasizing the importance of entertaining a vivid image of Christ: When a person wants to pray, he should not set out immediately with [prayer of    ] the mouth. He should turn his heart and should have an image of Christ Jesus before the eyes of reason, as if he ­were standing bodily before him, or as if ­were bearing him bodily beneath his pure heart. What Nider turns out to mean by this is, mainly, constant reflection on the biblical image of Christ, his life, his teaching, and his Passion. He often quotes the words of Christ as they are given in the gospels. He does say at one point that Christ himself gives instruction in the devout heart, but elsewhere he draws back from any such suggestion of immediate revelatory instruction and says that Christ gives teaching only through the means of another person’s instruction.37 Ludolph of Saxony’s compendious and diffuse Life of Christ borrowed heavi­ly from the Pseudo-­Bonaventuran Meditations while incorporating extensive exegetical and historical material.38 Ludolph also appended prayers to his 35. ​Walter Sauer, ed., The Metrical Life of Christ, ed. from MS BM Add. 39996 (Heidelberg: Winter, 1977). 36. ​ A Christology from the Sermons of St. Vincent Ferrer, trans. S. M. C. (London: Blackfriars, 1954). 37. ​Johannes Nider, Die vierundzwanzig goldenen Harfen, ed. Stefan Abel (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2011), 185, cf. 213. Cf. Claire Taylor Jones, Ruling the Spirit: W ­ omen, Liturgy, and Dominican Reform in Late Medieval Germany (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), 115, 268, 191. 38. ​Ludolphus de Saxonia, Vita Jesu Christi ex Evangelio et approbatis Ecclesia Catholica Doctoribus sedule collecta, ed. L.M. Rigollot (Paris: Palmé; Brussels: Lebrocquy, 1878); Ludolph of Saxony, The Life of Jesus Christ, trans. Milton T. Walsh (Athens, OH: Cistercian Publications, 2018–). On Ludolf generally, see Sr. Mary Immaculate Bodenstedt, The Vita Christi of Ludolphus the Carthusian (Washington, DC: Catholic University of Amer­i­ca Press, 1944); Charles Abbott Conway Jr., The “Vita Christi” of Ludolph of Saxony and Late Medieval Devotion Centered on the Incarnation: A Descriptive Analy­sis, Analecta Cartusiana, 34 (Salzburg: Institut für Englische Sprache und Literatur, 1976); Walter Baier, Untersuchungen zu den Passionsbetrachtungen in der “Vita Christi” des Ludolf von Sachsen: Ein quellenkritischer Beitrag zu Leben und Werk Ludolfs und zur Geschichte der Passionstheologie, Analecta Cartusiana, 44 (Salzburg: Institut für Englische Sprache und Literatur, 1977); and John J. Ryan, “Historical Thinking in Ludolph of Saxony’s Life of Christ,” Journal of Medieval and Re­nais­sance Studies 12 (1982): 67–81.

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meditations on the events of Christ’s life, often penitential in character.39 Inspired by the story of the ­woman taken in adultery in John 8, Ludolph prays to Christ, confessing, “My adulterous soul stands before you.” Commenting on the parables of Luke 15, he identifies himself as the straying sheep, the lost coin, the prodigal son. It is in his prayers on the Passion that Ludolph most fully blends penitence and contrition with both a sense of guilt and a desire for assimilation to the sufferings of Christ. He implores Christ, “Grant me, a sinner, . . . ​the joy of suffering similar afflictions.” Noting how graciously Christ looked upon Peter a­ fter his betrayal, he asks for a similarly merciful gaze in the light of his own denials through sin. The scourging inspires him to ask freedom from the scourges of eternal wrath that he deserves. The piercing with the crown of thorns prompts him to ask that his soul be pierced and that he attain a crown in heaven a­ fter ­doing penance. The mocking of Christ leads him to plead that he not be mocked by the Devil. As Christ carried the cross, he hopes to take up his own cross.40 Such writings often encouraged the meditating person to envisage herself entering into the scene and interacting with the sacred personages. She is urged to “descend to the crib of your God,” to “imagine being pre­sent and pretend to see the glorious Virgin Mary kneeling in front of the Child Jesus,” to hold the child Christ in her arms.41 In a more unusual case, the meditator sees himself playing ball with Christ as a boy.42 Sustained and disciplined meditation on the life of Christ would have prepared the devout Christian to cross over the fluid boundary between meditation and vision and to step back into the historical time of biblical narrative. The Pseudo-­Bonaventuran Meditations encouraged the reader to think of herself as pre­sent to the gospel events, as an eyewitness and even participant in t­ hose events, helping Mary tend the newborn infant Jesus or lamenting his death on the cross. Such meditations ­were scripts meant to cultivate deep immersion in the narrative and to cultivate such aptitude for visualization that the boundary between “I visualized” and “I saw” or even “­there appeared to me” became highly fluid.43 To meditate on events 39. ​Sr. Mary Immaculate Bodenstedt, Praying the Life of Christ: First En­glish Translation of the Prayers Concluding the 181 Chapters of Ludolphus the Carthusian: The Quintessence of His Devout Meditations on the Life of Christ (Salzburg: Institut für Englische Sprache und Literatur, 1973). 40. ​Bodenstedt, Praying the Life of Christ, 83, 101, 153, 155. 41. ​Anne Leader, The Badia of Florence: Art and Observance in a Re­nais­sance Monastery (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), 49–50, on Ludovico Barbo’s Modus meditandi et orandi. 42. ​Claire Fanger, Rewriting Magic: An Exegesis of the Visionary Autobiography of a Fourteenth-­Century Monk (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2015), 105–6, 147. 43. ​Barbara Newman, “What Did It Mean to Say ‘I Saw’?: The Clash between Theory and Practice in Medieval Visionary Culture,” Speculum 80 (2005): 1–43. Publishing in the same year, Bernard McGinn, in “Visions and Visualizations in the ­Here and Hereafter,” Harvard Theological Review 98 (2005): 227–46, made a related point: “What are presented as supernaturally-­g iven visions breaking into the conscious-



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from the gospel was to visualize t­ hose events so richly that it came to seem as if they w ­ ere taking place before one’s eyes. At times the link between meditation and vision is explicit: Gertrude of Helfta spoke of herself as led from the exercise of devotion into a vision of the Nativity.44 In other cases the connection is at least plausible. We cannot always conclude, however, that what meditation led to was ­actual visionary experience. Frequently when individuals ­were said to have been led from meditation into experience of the gospel events, the transition is explic­itly imaginative: it is “as if ” the one meditating ­were pre­sent to the event. When Flora of Beaulieu (ca. 1300–1347) meditated on the Passion she did so “as if she herself had been pre­sent with the disciples observing the Master.” When she envisioned him arrested she broke into tearful lament, “Alas, alas, they have bound my Lord God and are taking him away! ­Shall I not follow my Lord wherever he is led?” On Good Friday she ran about in frenzy. But then sorrow transfixed her “as if nails pierced her hands and feet and a lance pierced her side,” at which point she identified herself with Christ.45 Margaret Ebner entered into sacred time in correlation with the liturgical cycle. During the matins of Holy Thursday ­g reat pain and sorrow came over her, “so b­ itter that it was as if I w ­ ere ­really in the presence of my Beloved, my most heartily Beloved One, and as if I had seen His most painful sufferings with my own eyes and as if all ­were happening before me at that very moment.”46 One nun of Unterlinden saw Christ as though he ­were suffering again (“quasi ness of the mystic contain impor­tant ele­ments of visualization, that is, they are dependent both in reception and expression on the subject’s power of imaginative seeing” (235). While Newman is interested mainly in narrative visions for which meditation affords preparation and predisposition, McGinn’s formulation applies more broadly to nonnarrative visions. See Caroline Walker Bynum, Christian Materiality: An Essay on Religion in Late Medieval Eu­rope (New York: Zone, 2011), 101–2; and Mary Carruthers, The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhe­toric, and the Making of Images, 400–1200 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 184. I had made much the same point in Unquiet Souls: Fourteenth-­Century Saints and Their Religious Milieu (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 94, with focus more on the ways the vision was recalled and recorded than on the experience itself, although my comments do assume fluidity between the experience of (natu­ral) meditation and that of (super­natural) vision: “At times one suspects that the vision-­narrative was a hagiographic device for describing less exceptional meditative experience. . . . ​On [some] occasions it is [unclear] w ­ hether meditation was the occasion for what the biographer is claiming as a genuine vision or ­whether the vision-­narrative is (as one might suspect) a way of talking about the meditation. . . . ​Perhaps neither the saint nor the hagiographer would have felt compelled to distinguish rigidly between humanly induced meditation and divinely bestowed vision, especially since even the former would be seen as ultimately aroused by grace.” 44. ​Elizabeth A. Andersen, “Das Kind sehen: Die Visualisierung der Geburt Christi in Mystik und Meditation,” in Sehen und Sichtbarkeit in der Literatur des deutschen Mittelalters, ed. Ricarda Bauschke, Sebastian Coxon, and Martin H. Jones (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2011), 296. 45. ​See Kieckhefer, Unquiet Souls, 90; emphasis added, ­here and in the following quotations. 46. ​ME 113, Strauch ed., p. 52: “as ob ich gegenwertiklichen bi minem geminten hertzeklichen liebsten lieb gewesen wer und smerzelichez liden mit minen augen sehe und ze der zit allez vor mir geschehen wer.”

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iterum pateretur”); with her bodily ears she heard the hammers driving nails into his hands and feet; even if the experience was imaginary, it was so overpowering that the ­sister lay motionless, as though she could no longer live, and indeed a fever seized her and before long she died.47 Gertrude Rickeldey too was capable of entering into the gospel narrative and i­magined Christ’s Passion “in her spirit,” her senses “drawn inside” so that Christ and his m ­ other “became pre­sent to her in the spirit,” and each moment in his suffering “was actually pre­sent to her as though she had seen it with her eyes.”48 Meditation texts might encourage this imaginative approach to entering into the gospel narrative. The Pseudo-­Bonaventuran Meditations does so explic­itly: Moreover, you should not think that all his words and deeds that we can meditate on, ­were actually written down. But to make them stand out, I ­will tell you about t­ hese unwritten t­ hings just as if they had actually happened, at least insofar as they can piously be believed to be occurring or to have occurred; ­doing this in accord with certain imaginary scenarios, which the mind perceives in a varying way. . . . ​Therefore, when you ­will find me relating “the Lord Jesus”—or ­others who are brought into the narrative—­“said or did this or that,” even if such cannot be proven through Scripture itself, you should nonetheless accept it, as devout meditation demands. Regard this the same as if I ­were to say, “Make your meditation on the Lord Jesus as if he said or did thus and so.” . . . ​You must place yourself in the presence of what­ever is related as having been said or done by the Lord Jesus, as if you w ­ ere hearing it with your own ears and seeing it with your own eyes, giving it your total m ­ ental response.49 Among the modes of participation encouraged by ­these meditations was i­magined dialogue with Christ or with his m ­ other. A monk on the island of Farne, prob­ably John Whiterig or Quitrik (d. 1371), wrote a meditation whose beginning and ending are addressed to Christ crucified, with address to ­others in the course of the work. At one point, when he has been speaking to Christ and applying vari­ous Old Testament types to him, he anticipates response: 47. ​SB Unterlinden, 472–73 48. ​Anneke B. Mulder-­Bakker, The Dedicated Spiritual Life of Upper Rhine Noble ­Women: A Study and Translation of a Fourteenth-­Century Spiritual Biography of Gertrude Rickeldey of Ortenberg and Heilke of Staufenberg (Turnhout: Brepols, 2017), c. 1, pp. 115–16; c. 4, p. 125; c. 16, p. 177; c. 18, pp. 187–88. The sister-­books sometimes speak of entry into the events of Christ’s life, but without giving the narrative details. One ­sister at Katharinental saw Christ and the apostles sitting at the Last Supper and heard all the words Christ spoke, while another wished to see the Last Supper and in rapture came to a high mountain where she beheld just that scene (SB Katharinental, 107, 114). 49. ​John of Caulibus, Meditations, 4.



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“Speak, Lord, for thy servants listen.” A response placed in Christ’s mouth is referred to as “what Christ saith now to the churches.” Two short chapters follow in which the meditator and Christ engage in dialogue.50 In the book of Margery Kempe the most sustained account of specifically narrative vision comes near the end, in the description of her pilgrimage to the Holy Land.51 Her entry into sacred time is inspired not by liturgy so much as by sacred place. Her be­hav­ior at the holy places is sometimes compared to modern forms of hysterical conduct known as the “Jerusalem syndrome.”52 She witnessed “in the sight of her soul” how Christ knelt to receive his m ­ other’s blessing as he approached his Passion, then she fell in a swoon before him. A ­ fter beholding extended exchange of words and gestures between Christ and his ­mother, Margery became not only an observer but a participant, grasping Christ by his clothing, falling at his feet, praying him to bless her, weeping bitterly, and “saying in her mind” that she would rather he slew her than let her remain in the world without him. In other words, she projected herself so fully into the time of Christ that she anticipated with foreboding a time that is ­future to the visionary Margery, although past to the historical Margery. Christ told her to be still and remain with his ­mother; he would return to comfort them both, and the Virgin ratified his insistence. But then the Virgin and Margery followed Christ to the Mount of Olives and witnessed the arrest, in the main according to the Passion narrative in the gospel of John. Before long Margery saw with her spiritual eye how the Jews blindfold, buffet, and mock Jesus. The Virgin and Margery (her unworthy handmaid for the nonce) together wept at this sight. Throughout it seems as though she and the Virgin ­were together. At this point she interrupts the narrative to say that she had this sort of spiritual vision ­every Palm Sunday and Good Friday “and in many other wise,” over many years, causing her to cry bitterly and to suffer rebuke in many places. A further disruption to the narrative flow comes in the form of a locution from Christ to her soul, telling her (as a kind of voice-­over interpreting the action) that he suffered t­ hese and many more sorrows for her love. The narrative reads as though Kempe actually thought of herself as having traveled backward in time, and references to what she saw “in her soul” or said “in her mind” do not fully dispel that impression, although one passage where she beheld “­these spiritual sights” in her soul “as freshly and truly as if they had been done indeed in her bodily sight” makes the point somewhat more clearly. This is, in

50. ​John Whiterig, The Monk of Farne: The Meditations of a Fourteenth-­Century Monk, ed. Hugh Farmer, trans. by a Benedictine of Stanbrook (London: Longman, 1961), 46–48. 51. ​BMK 1.73–85 (Windeatt, 214–50). 52. ​Yuval Goren, “The Jerusalem Syndrome in Biblical Archaeology,” SBL Forum 3 (2005).

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any case, one of the stronger assertions of retrojection as at least seeming quite real. At some points Kempe’s narrative suggests a kind of double consciousness: she is aware of past and pre­sent events occurring si­mul­ta­neously. For long stretches of her account it may not be obvious that Kempe is having her visions of Christ surrounded by his disciples while she herself was surrounded by fellow worshipers, but on occasion she tips her hand and refers to t­hose standing around her.53 Dorothea of Montau sometimes also experienced double consciousness of the sacred past along with the liturgical pre­sent: during the Easter liturgy, Christ appeared to her as priests raised the cross from the Easter sepulcher.54 Anna Harrison points to a similar phenomenon in the lit­er­a­ture from Helfta.55 A rough analogy may be afforded by the modern experience of being caught up in technology, not so much distracted as abstracted from one’s physical environment while being psychologically transported to a virtual realm in which one is communicating with some remote interlocutor, while all the while being at least vaguely aware of one’s surroundings.56 Granted, this is double consciousness involving distinct spaces, not times, but psychologically the effect is much the same: a person is mentally in an environment distinct from his or her ­actual physical environment. Among the most “realistic” visions of scenes from the life of Christ w ­ ere ­those imparted to Birgitta of Sweden. Her vita says she dreamed of Christ’s crucifixion and thought it was happening just then, but her dream is reported as a dream, not an ­actual collapsing of time.57 Her Revelations, however, do suggest a kind of time-­travel. While ­these ­were not her most frequent form of mystical experience, they w ­ ere highly influential as sources for the way the life of Christ was depicted in devotional texts and in art. Her visions of the Nativity are particularly famous and influential,58 and she beheld the Passion “in pains53. ​BMK 1.73, pp. 214–15. For another example see LDP 3.15.1 (Barratt, p. 60). 54. ​LdF c. 58, p. 94. 55. ​Anna Harrison, “Thousands and Thousands of Lovers”: Sense of Community Among the Nuns of Helfta (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press/Cistercian Publications, 2022), 196: “It is often scarcely pos­si­ ble to distinguish a vision from the setting in which it takes place; the contents of a vision seemed to overlay like an elaborate transparency the events and p­ eople that swirled around the visionary as she receives a revelation, or to draw t­ hese into a vision that was something like a tableaux vivant in the midst of chapel or chapter.” 56. ​­Drivers are often said to be distracted when they talk on their cell phones, but it might be more accurate to speak of them as abstracted. They could just as well be distracted by passengers sitting next to them, without losing awareness of their environment. Far more dangerous is being psychologically abstracted from that environment by focus on a virtual auditory environment. 57. ​Birgitta of Sweden, Life and Selected Revelations, c. 10, p. 73. 58. ​Fabian Wolf, Die Weihnachtsvision der Birgitta von Schweden: Bildkunst und Imagination im Wechselspiel (Regensburg: Schnell & Steiner, 2018).



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taking detail.”59 ­There is l­ittle sense in her account that the experience was one of devout imagination, that it was “as if ” she was witnessing the events. But Birgitta was an exception even among the exceptional w ­ omen of the late medieval West. T ­ here is generally ­little emphasis in her life and revelations, even in the earliest fragments that derive most directly from her hand, that her experience was in continuity with that of fellow Christians. She and her clerical supporters clearly saw her as exceptional and her revelations not as arising out of pious meditation but as bolts of divine lightning from the blue. With her, intuition does not shade into but rather yields to perception.60 The interplay of prayer and meditation is richly illustrated by the prayer book associated with Ursula Begerin. This manuscript began around the turn of the fifteenth c­ entury as a cycle of drawings, focused largely on biblical subject m ­ atter, but late in the ­century vernacular prayers ­were added, which, like traditional meditations, could address Christ, then his ­mother, then Christ again, and, while centered on moments from his life and Passion, conveyed a strongly affective sense of his presence to the one using the book. Rich in apostrophe, the prayers have much of the flavor of meditations, but their function as prayers becomes clear when they ask for the grace of compassion and when they conclude as a prayer does with “Amen.” The book also demonstrates the fluidity of devotional context: elsewhere the passage is from the convent to the world of the laity, but this prayer book was composed originally for a laywoman and ­later adapted, with its meditative prayers, for a nun.61

Scripted Dialogues with Christ One genre that claimed some prominence in the fifteenth ­century, perhaps inspired in part by the dialogical moments in ­earlier meditations, was the scripted dialogue with Christ. Again, this was detached from any biographical setting, any claim that Christ interacts in a lasting way with a devotee. Dialogues of this sort might have been taken as models that inspired spontaneous dialogue, but ­there is ­little evidence that they served that purpose, and for the most part they come too late to have had an influence on fourteenth-­century 59. ​Birgitta of Sweden, Life and Selected Revelations, 21–24, pp. 202–5; 7.15–16, pp. 188–91. 60. ​Birgitta appears also in the vita of her ­daughter Catherine, and when Christ is revealed in this text, it is mainly to give divine sanction to what Birgitta commands Catherine to do. De S. Catharina Suecica filia S. Birgittae Vastenae in Suecia, 2.13–15, in Acta sanctorum, 3rd ed. (Paris: Palmé, 1863–1869), 3: 505–6. The text gives the impression that Christ was compliant to Birgitta’s w ­ ill. 61. ​Jeffrey Hamburger and Nigel Palmer, The Prayer Book of Ursula Begerin (Dietikon-­Zürich: Urs Graf, 2015).

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piety. Still, they bear witness to the ways Christocentric religion developed, and they may in some mea­sure have been inspired by, rather than an inspiration for, spontaneous dialogue with Christ. The best known case is Imitatio Christi ascribed to Thomas à Kempis (1380– 1471). One classic survey of Christian spiritual writing comments aptly that this author “knows l­ittle of Christ according to the flesh” and “hardly mentions the Virgin Mary,” but scarcely any medieval book “is more full of the interior life of Jesus within the soul.”62 Already in Book 1, the author has noted how effectively the crucified Jesus would teach us if he entered our hearts, while in Book 2 he assures the reader that one who seeks Jesus in every­thing ­will find him.63 Book 2 goes on to comment at length on how all is well when Jesus is pre­sent, and when he speaks inwardly, and how the art of knowing how to commune with Jesus is a g­ reat art.64 Book 3, in its entirety a dialogue between the disciple and Jesus, begins with the voice of the disciple: I ­shall listen to what the Lord God [meaning Christ] w ­ ill say deep within my heart. Blessed is the soul that listens to the Lord speaking within and that receives a word of comfort from him. Blessed are the ears that are attuned to the soft whisper of God’s voice and that ignore the buzzing of the world. . . . ​Mark ­these ­things, my soul; be s­ ilent, and visit the quiet recesses of your own heart. It is t­ here that you w ­ ill hear God’s voice.65 Jesus responds, and the disciple says, “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.”66 While the divine voice is explic­itly said to be that of Jesus, it is said to be also the voice that inspired Moses and the prophets. It comes now to the devout soul in meditation. Christ says he imparts common teachings 62. ​Pierre Rousselot and Joseph Huby, “Chris­tian­ity in the ­Middle Ages,” in The Life of the Church, ed. Pierre Rousselot, Léonce de Grandmaison, Joseph Huby, Alexandre Brou, and Martin Cyril D’Arcy (London: Sheed & Ward, 1932), 191. 63. ​Thomas à Kempis, De imitatione Christi libri quatuor: Edizione critica, ed. Tiburzio Lupo (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1982), 84, 105; Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ: A New Reading of the 1441 Latin Autograph Manuscript, ed. William  C. Creasy (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 2007), 31, 42. For an example of dialogue with Christ in a prayer-­like song, also from the tradition of the Devotio Moderna, see Thom Mertens and Dieuwke van der Poel, “Individuality and Scripted Role in Devout Song and Prayer,” in Inwardness, Individualization, and Religious Agency in the Late Medieval Low Countries: Studies in the “Devotio Moderna” and Its Contexts, ed. Rijcklof Hofman, Charles Caspers, Peter Nissen, Mathilde van Dijk, and Johan Oosterman (Turnhout: Brepols, 2020), 168–69. 64. ​Thomas à Kempis, De imitatione Christi, 2.8, pp. 106–7 (Creasy, 42): “Quando Iesus adest, totum bonum est; Magna ars est scire conversari cum Iesu. Creasy translates conversari with “converse,” which is certainly justifiable, but I have chosen “commune” (meaning converse or simply be in close association) to hint at the ambiguity. 65. ​Thomas à Kempis, De imitatione Christi, 3.1, pp. 133–34 (Creasy, 55). 66. ​Thomas à Kempis, De imitatione Christi, 3.2, p. 135 (Creasy, 55), alluding to I Samuel 3:9–10.



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(communia) to some and spiritual ones (spiritualia) to ­others; he uses signs and figures for some while revealing many mysteries to ­others in ­g reat clarity, as he sees fit.67 In other contexts the boundary between literary composition and report of a­ ctual experience is difficult to define, but h ­ ere t­ here is no pretense that this is a rec­ord of something that actually occurred, no attempt to situate the dialogue within even a fictionalized setting. It is clearly meant to be understood as a literary composition to be used for meditative reading. But the assertion made in the meditation is that anyone who engages in such meditation w ­ ill in fact hear the voice of Christ speaking inwardly. This par­tic­u­lar dialogue is constructed, but the message it conveys is that dialogue of this sort ­really occurs, ­because Christ is assumed to be ­really pre­sent and r­ eally interacting with t­ hose who address him, even if his speech is more subtle than overt.68 That assumption may be shared by the narratives of mystical presence we have been examining, but then the assumption of Christ’s real spiritual presence and accessibility was simply a commonplace in Christian piety. Denis the Carthusian (1402–1471) composed a similarly extended dialogical meditation in which the speakers are Christ and a monastic novice. Christ ­here instructs the young man how to live the monastic life, how to achieve virtue, how to meditate, what books to read. It is as though Christ himself ­were the novice master, and no doubt the ­human novice master would have said very much what Christ ­here says.69 For Isabella of Portugal, Denis wrote a dialogical meditation in which Christ explains how even amid the allurements and distractions of courtly life he can enter into the chamber of a pious person’s heart, and how with due preparation one can pray, participate in liturgy, confess, receive communion, and be united with God. Isabella should picture Christ’s Passion “as if pre­sent before your eyes,” how his “most cruel enemies” abused him—­but then the text lapses from first person to third, becoming a more conventional meditation rather than a meditative dialogue. Elsewhere, recounting the joys of the blessed, Christ gives a somewhat labored paraphrase of a stanza from Thomas Aquinas’s “Verbum supernum prodiens” (“The Supernal Word ­Going Forth”).70 Following the model set by Denis, Nicholas Finet wrote a dialogue for Isabella’s daughter-­in-­law Margaret of York, Duchess of 67. ​Thomas à Kempis, De imitatione Christi, 3.43.14–16, p. 244 (Creasy, 102). 68. ​Rebecca Krug, “Jesus’ Voice: Dialogue and Late Medieval Readers,” in Form and Reform: Reading across the Fifteenth C ­ entury, Shannon Gayk and Kathleen Tonry (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2011), 116–23. 69. ​ The Spiritual Writings of Denis the Carthusian, trans. Íde M. Ní Riain (Dublin: Four Courts, 2005), 395–421. 70. ​Dionysius Cartusianus, De vita et regimine principissæ dialogus, in Doctoris ecstatici d. Dionysii Cartusiani Opera minora, vol. 5 (= Opera omnia, vol. 37) (Tournau: Typis Cartusiæ S.  M. de Pratis, 1909), 501–18; reference to the Passion at 513–14 (art. 11), and paraphrase of Thomas at 516 (art. 13).

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Burgundy, in which Christ assures the duchess that he w ­ ill enter the chamber of her heart, and w ­ ill feast and lie with her, and gives her counsel on how to live devoutly at court.71 In ­these texts Christ is pictured as providing guidance for someone of a par­ tic­u­lar station in life, and sometimes t­ here is suggestion of a biographical context. Finet’s dialogue addresses the concerns of a w ­ oman in a par­tic­ul­ar situation, one filled with distractions from piety and virtue. He depicts Christ as familiar with the f­amily situation of Margaret of York. But t­ here is ­little if any specific reference to concrete incidents in the lives of individuals or communities, no indication of the way in which the dialogue came to be revealed, no “dialogue guides” or “reporting clauses” to indicate that the discourse was situated within a course of events, even a fictional one.72 This is again a manifestly scripted dialogue, written by Finet for Margaret for her use in meditation. The recipients and their situations w ­ ere par­tic­u­lar, but Christ is not shown in the texts as appearing at specific moments in their oratories, in their kitchens, or at their bedsides. The Imitation of Christ and the writings of Denis the Carthusian are ­later than most of the texts analyzed in this book, but the notion of a dialogical meditation was already available in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Most importantly, even writers who elsewhere did write reports of personal experience involving communication with Christ sometimes also wrote what w ­ ere clearly meditative dialogues, and the distinction between the two modes of writing is not always clear. Mechthild of Magdeburg’s Flowing Light of Divinity contains chapters in which Christ delivers a carefully crafted poetic statement and the soul responds in kind. Her work also includes dialogues with allegorical characters such as Love, Lady Knowledge, or Contemplation, that are presumably not meant to be understood as reports on ­actual events.73 Gertrude of Helfta also reported on personal communication with Christ, but in her Exercitia spiritualia (Spiritual Exercises) she gave a scripted dialogue between Christ and the soul.74 71. ​On Le Dyalogue de la Duchesse de Bourgogne à Jesu Christ, in British Library ms. Add. 7970, see especially Andrew Taylor, “Displaying Privacy: Margaret of York as Devotional Reader,” in Cultures of Religious Reading in the Late ­Middle Ages: Instructing the Soul, Feeding the Spirit, and Awakening the Passion, ed. Sabrina Corbellini (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013), 289–92. For the text and a well-­known miniature in the manuscript, see Christina Normore, A Feast for the Eyes: Art, Per­for­mance, and the Late Medieval Banquet (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 190–93. Erica O’Brien at the University of Bristol is working on the text of this dialogue. 72. ​Deborah Tannen and Heide E. Hamilton, The Handbook of Discourse Analy­sis, 2nd ed. (Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2018). 73. ​FLG 1.5, pp. 92–93; 2.18, pp. 102–3; 2.22, pp. 112–13 (Tobin, 44–45, 80, 86–87). 74. ​Gertrude d’Helfta, Les exercises, vol. 1 of Œuvres spirituelles, ed. and trans. Jacques Hourlier and Albert Schmitt (Paris: Cerf, 1967), 92–98: “Exercitium desponsationis et consecrationis,” with “Vox Christi ad animam” and “Vox animae.”



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Such dialogical meditations, unlike some of the narrative meditations of the era, do not seem to have been meant as invitations to f­ ree invention. They w ­ ere didactic texts; the dialogue genre was meant as a vehicle for specific teaching, rather than for spontaneous devotional immersion. ­These texts may to some extent have been inspired by awareness of the more spontaneous dialogues from Helfta and elsewhere, and they may conceivably have been written in part to tame the tradition of conversation with Christ, bringing it into a more conventional if not necessarily more orthodox framework. They are further witnesses to the devotion to Christ that flourished in the ­later medieval West, and thus they serve to provide broader context for the texts we are discussing, but if ­there is influence in ­either direction, it is most likely to be from the lit­er­a­ture of Christophany to t­ hese scripted dialogues than the reverse.75

Borderline Cases The prayers and meditations discussed so far sometimes invite vividly i­ magined participation in the life of Christ that might shade into visionary experience and might be reported as vision. At other times the texts have a clearly scripted and even didactic character. Even a text that purports to rec­ord a­ ctual Christophany might in turn become a script that could mold readers’ expectations for their own experience and provide verbal and conceptual vocabulary for ­later accounts. In some cases it is not easy to draw a clear distinction between literal Christophany and scripted meditations or dialogues. We have an autograph manuscript recording the revelations or meditations of Katharina Tucher of Nürnberg between 1418 and 1421.76 A few chapters are dated by reference to the liturgical calendar—­the Friday ­after Corpus Christi, Holy Innocents Day, the Friday night before Epiphany—­but ­there is ­little other indication of context or circumstance. Roughly a quarter of the chapters contain brief dialogues between Christ and Tucher or her soul. Somewhat more of them have speech of Christ evidently directed to Tucher. Interspersed with ­these chapters are dialogues with Mary, an entreaty from the Devil, and passages that seem to be Tucher’s own reflections meant for herself. Several chapters are introduced with the phrase “Mir wart gegenbvrtig,” 75. ​Healing charms sometimes include a kind of dialogue with Christ, and this type of charm may possibly have become more common in the late medieval period. See Marcello Barbato, ed., Incantamenta latina et romanica: Scongiuri e formule magiche dei secoli V–­XV (Rome: Salerno Editrice, 2019), nos. 12–15, 28, 29, 31, 34, 35, 37, and 39; cf. no. 32. 76. ​Katharina Tucher, Die “Offenbarungen,” ed. Ulla Williams and Werner Williams-­Krapp (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1998).

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“It became pre­sent to me” or “It was revealed to me” or the equivalent, which suggests that Tucher is recording ­actual revelatory experiences. But the seventh chapter is an allegorical dialogue between Body and Soul, W ­ ill, Reason, Understanding, Heart, and Memory. Chapter 24 is an allegory rendered as a dialogue, in which Christ tells Tucher about the soul being set on a white lamb and riding out on a hunt for a stag, which turns into a dialogue between the stag and a king, and at the end the king, the lamb, and the stag all meet together in Jerusalem. Chapters 28 and 29 are dialogues between Christ and two biblical ­women, the ­woman taken in adultery and the w ­ oman at the well, both of them characters with whom Tucher seems to have identified. And in chapter 50 her confessor speaks to her, telling her she should come to him the next day and upbraiding her for her sinful ways. The e­ arlier chapters in Tucher’s highly diverse compilation contain some passages represented as revelations imparted to Tucher and ­others more easily conceived as dialogical meditations she has constructed or borrowed from other sources.77 It is pos­si­ble but difficult to imagine that she witnessed a dialogue of Body and Soul, ­Will, Reason, and other allegorical figures as a mystical revelation, and the dialogues between Christ and the biblical ­women are reminiscent more of mystery plays than of strictly revelatory experience. ­Later in the compilation, however, the balance shifts, with a stronger tone of existential urgency, grief, and anxiety over specified personal circumstance. Christ tells her of her husband’s and her ­mother’s release from purgatory and offers hope of salvation a­ fter purgatory for herself. She goes to church on the day ­after New Year and Christ reveals that she is his bride and is married to him, but then he tells her she is unworthy to kiss him on the mouth and should restrict herself to his feet, with Mary Magdalene, and take refuge in his heart. ­Later he tells her that her confessor has been deeply concerned about her and has wept hot tears for her sake.78 Every­thing in the document can be read as meditation rather than report on experience, and the dates can be read as dates for the meditations and their recording. But the distinction would be artificial: increasingly as she proceeds, Tucher tells of heart-­rending exchanges in which even if she is imagining it all, she is d­ oing so with a vividness that carries the force of experience. Clearly she is writing in ­these chapters about moments of profound personal concern, and just as clearly she senses that Christ is addressing her concern at ­those moments. 77. ​On parallels and pos­si­ble sources, see Rabia Gregory, Marrying Jesus in Medieval and Early Modern Northern Eu­rope: Popu­lar Culture and Religious Reform (Farnham: Ashgate, 2016), 100–101. 78. ​Tucher, Die “Offenbarungen,” cc. 78, 82–83, 85, 86, 92, pp. 64–67, 69–70.



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If we wish, we can distinguish between ­actual revelatory dialogues and dialogues intended and accepted as literary constructions.79 Or, more precisely, we can say that sometimes the texts pre­sent themselves more as the one or the other. When we look at a compilation like that of Katharina Tucher, however, it becomes difficult to make a sharp distinction. Would we be willing to say that some of the sections seem clearly to be literary constructions, and therefore we may assume that of all? Or the reverse, that in some cases we have a sense of deep existential engagement and au­then­tic personal experience, which we may then posit for the collection as a w ­ hole? Or should we recognize that deep immersion in constructed dialogues can affect the way one’s spiritual life is both expressed and experienced? Perhaps most plausibly we see in Tucher an example of what Shunji Oguro has described in an Italian context: writing as an exercise in “self-­dialogue,” a tool of “internalization-­ rumination.”80 Seen in that light, ­there is less distance between revelatory dialogue and literary construction, b­ ecause even overtly constructed texts can be meant and read as giving witness to a revelatory insight that gives stimulus and subject m ­ atter for rumination.81 If the text of Katharina Tucher comes across as personal testimony with ele­ments of scripted meditation, the Dutch Jesus Collations (“Discourses with Jesus”) pre­sent the opposite, an elaborate set of meditations that represents itself as based on apparitions of Christ.82 This anonymous text, which survives in fifteenth-­century manuscripts, comes from a community of tertiary ­sisters. The premise is that Christ comes at specified times in the liturgical year to preach to the s­ isters, one of whom should write down what he says for the benefit of the o ­ thers. It seems at first that the apparition is made to the w ­ hole community. But then ­there is reference to a “maid of Christ” who is “united with God her bridegroom,” who speaks to her, which suggests that the revelation is to an individual or series of individuals but meant for dissemination 79. ​On this issue see the positions staked out in Peter Dinzelbacher, Vision und Visionsliteratur im Mittelalter (Stuttgart: Hiersemann, 1981); Ursula Peters, Religiöse Erfahrung als literarisches Faktum: Zur Vorgeschichte und Genese frauenmystischer Texte des 13. und 14. Jahrhunderts (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1988); Peter Dinzelbacher, “Zur Interpretation erlebnismystischer Texte des Mittelalters,” Zeitschrift für deutsches Alterum und deutsche Literatur 117 (1988): 1–23. See also Frank Tobin, Mechthild of Magdeburg: A Medieval Mystic in Modern Eyes (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1995), 115–22. 80. ​Shunji Oguro, “From Ears to Hand, from Hand to Heart: Writing and Internalizing Preaching in Fifteenth-­Century Florence,” in From Words to Deeds: The Effectiveness of Preaching in the Late ­Middle Ages, ed. M.G. Muzzarelli (Turnhout: Brepols, 2014), 47–64. 81. ​On this point see in par­tic­u­lar Barbara Newman, God and the Goddesses: Vision, Poetry, and Belief in the ­Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), chap. 1. 82. ​Anna Maria Baaij, ed., Jhesus collacien: een laatmiddeleeuwse prekenbundel uit de kringen der tertiarissen (Zwolle: W.E.J. Tjeenk Willink, 1962).

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within and perhaps beyond the h ­ ouse. The “sweet doctor Jesus” comes and gives a framework for meditation. In one case it is a set of twelve golden stairways, then for Lent it is forty cells in the wilderness, and again l­ater it is a series of twelve garlands for the months of the year. Each of ­these frameworks is then interpreted. For example, Jesus teaches his bride how to make a garland for each month to show him her love. The garland for June is a lavender crown that consists in meditation on the beauty of Christ’s body, his presence in the sacrament, his mistreatment by the Jews, and so forth. The garland for August is a crown of daisies, meaning meditation on how Christ the Son in heaven is embraced by the ­Father thirty-­one times, once for each day of the month, and each time the embrace is received with reference to Christ’s incarnation, life, and death, and each time the Son shows his willingness to accept the ­Father’s ­will. In this case ­there is only the barest minimum of context for the revelation. The liturgical occasion is mentioned, and it is said that ­there is a recipient or scribe, but beyond that the set of meditations remains detached from any pretense of life setting, and we are presumably not expected to take as literal that this is a series of ­actual revelations.

Interjections and Repetitive Prayers as the Stimuli to Awareness of Presence Narrative meditations and scripted dialogues could be impor­tant for evoking a sense of Christ’s presence, but almost surely it was short, s­ imple prayers, often repeated in long sequences, that evoked that presence most powerfully. Direct and repetitive prayer could have an almost hypnotic effect, intensely focusing attention on the divine figure addressed in a way that could result in a vivid sense of presence and deep engagement.83 Brief, repetitive prayer was commonly practiced among the nuns of Helfta, and when Mechthild of Hackeborn wished to know how Christ himself praised the ­Father, she learned that 83. ​See also Gertrud Jaron Lewis, By W ­ omen, for ­Women, about ­Women: The Sister-­Books of Fourteenth-­ Century Germany (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1996), 146–47. See Rachel Fulton, “Praying by Numbers,” Studies in Medieval and Re­nais­sance History, ser. 3, vol. 4 (2007): 232–47. John Cassian, Conferences, trans. Colm Luibheid (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist, 1985), 9.36 and 10.10, pp. 124 and 132–36, recommends brief prayer and in par­tic­u­lar the urgent entreaty of Psalm 70:1 (69:2 Vulg.). Kevin Hunt, “Simplicity of Prayer,” in Monastic Experiences of Interreligious Dialogue, special issue of the International Bulletin (E.14) of Commisions pour le Dialogue Interreligieux Monastique / Monastic Interreligious Dialogue Commissions (2003), 33: “Shortly ­after entering the monastery I found that the traditional ways of praying and meditating had begun to feel too cumbersome for me. I was attracted to simpler ways of praying. . . . ​As I pushed the mop around the cloister I found myself saying ­simple short prayers. . . . ​My novice master gave me the princi­ple: t­here are no hard and fast rules in meditation, but that prayer and meditation always tend to become more ­simple.”



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he did so with the single word fiat.84 Concise prayers might be all a person could pray on her deathbed, but t­ hose who had experienced d­ ying persons repeating “Good Jesus, good Jesus” or other such “aspirations” would have all the more reason to think of them as particularly intense expressions of the longing for or experience of presence.85 Johannes Marienwerder’s accounts of Dorothea of Montau report a g­ reat deal of her prayer that is said to be inspired and even dictated to her by Christ. Her prayer is almost always ­simple and direct. Typically for her era, she was much devoted to the name “Jesus Christ,” and when she heard it at mass or in the canonical hours or elsewhere, she often went into ecstasy.86 Orally or silently she would repeat his name and titles: “My most loving Lord Jesus Christ, my dearest ­father Jesus Christ, my dearest king Jesus Christ!” With typically medieval fluidity in assignment of roles she addressed Christ as “my most loving lord, my most lovable f­ ather, my most desirable Lord God Jesus Christ, my creator, . . . ​my friend, my ­brother, my bridegroom.”87 In one passage ­these titles are joined in a kind of litany: Most merciful ­father, renowned, most faithful friend, most praiseworthy bridegroom, most gracious . . . ​O most beloved, dearest, most clean, most highly worthy, chosen from thousands, bright and rosy (Song of Songs 5:10), O Lord my God, nothing is better than you, O God! ­There is nothing greater than you, my God! T ­ here is nothing more worthy, more power­f ul, more wise, more beautiful, more kind, e­ tc., than you, my most beloved Lord, Jesus Christ!88 She addressed Christ with “blandishments” or “endearments” that came in an outpouring of many words, which she thought of as coming from Christ himself.89 If she used more than simply divine names, it would often be to offer gratitude, particularly for coming to her in communion, but also for his goodness, for his incarnation, for his holy humanity, for her own Christian life. If she expressed a petition, it might be a ­simple and direct cry for help, an appeal to remain with her, to eat and drink with her, or to take her quickly to her

84. ​Mary Jeremy Finnegan, The ­Women of Helfta: Scholars and Mystics (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991), 39, 67, 74. 85. ​Finnegan, The ­Women of Helfta, 29. 86. ​In Germany, a prominent advocate of devotion to the name of Jesus was Henry Suso; see The Life of the Servant, 2.45, in Suso, The Exemplar, 173–74. 87. ​VDM 3.5.a, p. 117, cf. LDM 2.5, p. 85; 4.25.b, p. 189; 4.27.e and g, p. 192; 5.44.f, p. 283; 4.35.h, p. 203. 88. ​VDM 4.35.i, pp. 203–4. 89. ​VDM, especially 4.35, pp. 202–4; 4.35.c, p. 202; 4.35.f, p. 203.

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eternal reward.90 Christ himself dictated prayer formulas he expected her to speak back to him. Some ­were her ­simple prayers of petition, chiefly for spiritual benefits to herself and o ­ thers, as well as for blessing of meals.91 In her prayer as on other occasions she experienced a kind of synaesthesia: at times her prayers to Christ ­were accompanied by sensations of fragrance, taste, vision, or hearing, all presumably received by her inner senses, which could be activated by the sense of spiritual presence that came to her in prayer.92 Her prayer practice is reported in detail in the Liber de festis (Book of feast days), most particularly for the feast of the Nativity of the Virgin, with a strong emphasis on s­ imple verbal prayer. She would pray for three or four hours at a time, sometimes (we are told) all day. She said Ave Marias ceaselessly, sometimes a hundred or even hundreds of times, frequently in response to Christ’s instruction. Habitually, but again also ­under instruction from Christ, she used brief interjections addressed to Christ as her prayers, which she would sometimes repeat over and over: “My most beloved Lord Jesus Christ! My most beloved Lord Jesus Christ!” or “O Jesus, true love, how g­ reat a love you are!” and other such formulas. Christ told her to repeat the liturgical words of the Gloria “Tu solus es Deus, tu solus sanctus, tu solus Dominus, tu solus altissimus, Iesu Christe.” When she received communion, she might be content with the ­simple formula “Jesus Christ, son of the living God!” But she might find herself startled by the outcry of her soul, saying, “Good Jesus, enter in, thou paschal food; enter in, thou unleavened bread; enter in, thou heavenly bridegroom!” She prayed kneeling and standing, and sometimes with her hands extended in the form of a cross; once she wanted to prostrate herself in the form of a cross before a crucifix, but her womb was swollen (suggesting a mystical pregnancy presented in a highly physical manner) and she could not do so.93 Margaret Ebner used an extended prayer that she called her Pater Noster,94 but increasingly she too relied on short, ­simple prayers. She gives an example: “Jesus Christ, my heartfelt Love, have mercy on me! Jesus Christ, my pure Truth, teach me truth! Jesus Christ, sweet Love, teach me love! Jesus Christ, boundless Mercy, come to help me!” She was also intensely devoted to the sa90. ​VDM 4.32.b, p. 197; 5.44.d, pp. 282–83; 5.43.c, pp. 279–80; 5.44.k, p. 284; 5.18.f, p. 241; 5.44.g, p. 283; 5.43.a, p. 279; 4.39.c, p. 208; 5.17.g, p. 239; 5.35.d, p. 269, 5.36.c, p. 270. 91. ​VDM 1.4.e, p. 37l; 5.8.d, p. 223; cf. 5.4.e, pp. 216–17; 5.10.h, p. 228; 5.12.h, p. 230; 5.25.f, p. 252; 5.39.d, pp. 274–75; 5.39.e, p. 275; 4.25.g, pp. 189–90; 5.12.b, pp. 229–30; 4.39.a, p. 208; 5.3.b, p. 215; 5.20.a, pp. 242–43; 1.6.w, p. 48; 5.18.b, p. 240. 92. ​VDM 4.35.g, p. 203. 93. ​LdF c. 6, p. 12; c. 56, pp. 91–92; c. 84, p. 143; cc. 86–91, pp. 144–58; c. 94, p. 165; c. 96, p. 167; c. 103, p. 178; c. 114, p. 192; c. 116, pp. 196–97; c. 119, p. 202; cf. LDM 3.16, pp. 167–68. 94. ​ME passim; see trans., 87, 89, 96, 99–100, 103, 107, 111, 116, 121, 123–25, 130, 133, 135, 137– 38, 143, 146–47, 150, 164.



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cred name, which in her case meant that she would recite the name “Jesus Christ” repeatedly. T ­ here ­were other prayers that she used at the elevation of the host and the chalice; the brevity of ­these moments meant that the prayers had to be short and s­ imple. She also made use of counting prayers, meaning the Our F ­ ather or some other prayer counted a specific number of times.95 The extreme case of this prayer is perhaps that of a Carthusian monk, Richard Methley (ca. 1451–1527/8), who in the 1480s wrote a dialogue in which he debates with Christ, pleading to be taken to his heavenly reward, addressing Christ with the words “O my God” or “O Lord God,” and pouring out his entreaty with vocative hammer blows: “O Jesu Jesu Jesu! Jesu Jesu Jesu! Jesu Jesu Jesu! I languish for love and rejoice at heart, or rather I dance for surpassing joy. Jesu Jesu Jesu!” and “Jesu Jesu Jesu! Jesu Jesu Jesu! Jesu Jesu Jesu, hear my cry! Jesu Jesu Jesu! Jesu Jesu Jesu! Jesu Jesu Jesu, wake up and receive my spirit. Jesu Jesu Jesu! Jesu Jesu Jesu! Jesu Jesu Jesu!” Methley sees himself as sharing not just a bedroom but a bed with his beloved Christ, and while his use of the explic­itly erotic imagery of the Song of Songs, the reference to the mystical embrace and kiss, is sparing, his ecstatic outpouring is not.96 In the f­ourteenth c­ entury, devotion to the name of Jesus was cultivated widely,97 with pre­ce­dent in the work of Anselm of Canterbury and Bernard of Clairvaux. It was promoted vigorously by Richard Rolle in E ­ ngland, Henry Suso in Germany, and Bernardino of Siena in Italy. Lyr­ics ­were composed to venerate the name. The name came to be associated, by Bernardino and o ­ thers, with the “Christogram” IHS. A liturgical feast honoring the Holy Name was established in the late fifteenth c­ entury. Reverence for the name “Jesus,” echoing veneration to the “hallowed” name of the ­Father, is biblical in origin: Paul’s Christological hymn in Philippians says that “at the name of Jesus ­every knee should bow” (2:10); elsewhere Paul says that ­those who call on “the name of the Lord” w ­ ill be saved (Romans 10:13); demons are exorcised by Jesus’s 95. ​ME passim; see trans., 86, 97; 144; 93, 95, 99–100, 102–4, 107–9, 111–12, 118, 127, 129, 131, 137, 139, 143–44, 146–48, 151, 154–56, 161, 163, 167–68, 172; 164; 128, 130. See Barbara Koch, “Margaret Ebner,” in Medieval Holy ­Women in the Christian Tradition, c. 1100–­c. 1500, ed. Alastair Minnis and Rosalynn Voaden (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010), 400. 96. ​James Hogg, “A Mystical Diary: The Refectorium salutis of Richard Methley of Mount Grace Charter­house,” in Kartäusermystik und -­mystiker: Dritter Internationaler Kongress über Kartäusergeschichte und -­spiritualität, ed. James Hogg (Salzburg: Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Universität Salzburg, 1981), 1:208–38; Richard Methley, “The Bedroom of the Beloved Beloved,” cc. 19 and 21, in The Works of Richard Methley, trans. Barbara Newman, intro. Laura Saetveit Miles (Athens, OH: Cistercian Publications, 2021), 69–70, 71–73. 97. ​Catherine A. Carsley, “Devotion to the Holy Name: Late Medieval Piety in ­England,” Prince­ ton University Library Chronicle 53 (1992): 156–72; Denis Renevey, “ ‘Desyrable Is Thi Name’: Fashioning the Name of Jesus in Some Devotional Compilations,” in Late Medieval Devotional Compilations in ­England, ed. Marleen Cré, Diana Denissen, and Denis Renevey (Turnhout: Brepols, 2020), 291–308.

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name (Mark 9:38–39); and Jesus tells his disciples to make petitions in his name ( John 16:23). It might seem that what is dif­fer­ent about late medieval devotion to the name is its objectification, especially when the name itself is lovingly repeated and venerated in the visual form of the Christogram. For Richard Rolle the name itself holds power, analogous (Gordon Mursell has suggested) to that ascribed to the divine name in Hebrew: if you think constantly and devoutly of the name “Jesus,” it w ­ ill cleanse your sin and enflame your heart, dispel trou­bles and lethargy, chase the Devil away, open heaven, and make you a contemplative.98 Naming was a way of making pre­sent. It was a crucial ele­ment in conjuring spirits, ­whether angelic or demonic. While one would not want to say that Jesus was normally conjured in that way, fervently emotional absorption in his name was among the ways of recognizing him as pre­sent.99 We are speaking h ­ ere of Christ’s personal name. In other contexts the sources tend more often than not to speak of “Christ” or “the Lord” and to address him as “Lord” or simply “God.” We have seen how t­ hese titles can have vari­ous significance. Depending on context, “Lord” can be a more relational term than “God,” but “God” may convey the higher sense of honor and majesty. The shortest of prayers, the interjections, are more likely to invoke the name “Jesus,” which is most clearly a personal name and conveys a stronger sense of intimacy, a stronger affective charge. It could be understood as referring specifically to Christ in his historical, incarnate life, but when used in or as a prayer, it serves instead to evoke a sense of intimate presence, and this is the sort of prayer most likely to lead ­toward intuition and perhaps perception of that presence.

98. ​Richard Rolle, “The Form of Living,” c. 9, in Richard Rolle, The En­glish Writings, trans. Rosamund  S. Allen (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist, 1989), p.  173; Gordon Mursell, En­glish Spirituality (London: SPCK, 2001), p. 191. 99. ​And yet ­there ­were exceptional cases in which Christ was conjured, very much as angels might be in ritual magic. A text by the hermit Pelagius of Majorca (d. ca. 1480) called The Art of the Crucified describes a complex ritual involving a wooden crucifix that is laid on a special altar, venerated with incense, and addressed with a series of prayers, which ­will lead to Christ appearing to the operator in his sleep and answering questions about the past, pre­sent, and f­ uture, the status of the dead, ­people’s secret thoughts and actions, hidden trea­sure, the health of friends and enemies, the arts and sciences, the virtues of stones, the power of words, the names and offices of spirits, and many other ­things. As with ritual magic generally, the operator must observe regulations for purity and secrecy. When he has done the ritual often enough for it to become customary, “the Crucified” ­will appear now and then even when not summoned, “and w ­ ill speak with you face to face, like a friend to a friend, teaching the truth about many ­things, from which you may know the truth about any doubtful question, w ­ hether for yourself or for another.” See J. Véronèse, “La notion d’auteur-­magicien à la fin du Moyen Âge: Le cas de l’ermite Pelagian de Majorque (†v. 1480),” Médiévales 51 (2006): 131–33, nn61–68, from British Library Harley ms 181, fols. 75r–80v.



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Prayer before Images and the Realization of ­Imagined Presence Realized imagination in the threefold sense discussed above (taking something for real­ity, making something real­ity, and recognizing something as already real­ ity) seems to have been especially fostered by the exercise of praying before images, particularly the ubiquitous three-­dimensional images of the Virgin and Child and the crucifix. Already in The Herald of Divine Loving-­Kindness we find Gertrude of Helfta deeply engaged with a crucifix as a concrete manifestation of presence.100 In certain of the sister-­books we find the ­sisters engaged with devotional images as foci for private prayer and stimuli for realization of presence. Gertrude was among ­those for whom the crucifix became animated. One Friday night as she lay sleepless, she remembered the comfort she derived from plucking the iron nails out of her crucifix and replacing them with flowers. She did that, and she asked Christ how he liked the replacement; it pleased him, and in return he poured the balm of his divinity into the wounds of her sins. She embraced, kissed, and caressed the crucifix, then put it aside and said good night to it. But as she lay in bed, Christ stretched out his hand from the cross and placed it to her neck, as if embracing her. He then began singing a sacred love song to her, over and over, keeping her awake, and urging her to add her prayers between verses of his song. Before daybreak she fi­nally got a bit of sleep, and as she slept he placed food in her mouth from the wound in his side.101 It would be easy to construct a naturalistic interpretation of this nocturnal devotion: an insomniac ­woman turns to devotional aids for relief of tension, her devotion takes a playfully erotic tone, especially when she rolls onto the hand of Christ, and as her fantasies continue, she lies awake with an earworm ­running through her head. But of course neither Gertrude nor her contemporaries would have taken the i­ magined presence as unreal. The imaginative play recounted h ­ ere is meant for engagement with a presence presupposed by Gertrude and ­others in her narrower and wider communities. The devotional images most prevalent in the late medieval West ­were cult images abstracted from narrative: an image of the Virgin and Child assumes that the Virgin is holding the infant Jesus on her lap or in her arms for viewing and veneration, as in the adoration by the magi; the crucifix isolates the point in the Passion at which Christ is dead and has been pierced in the side, so that he has the five classic wounds in his hands, feet, and side. Three further images that became widespread in late medieval religious culture w ­ ere 100. ​See also VCH c. 7 (trans., 7–8). 101. ​LDP 3.45 (Barratt, 145–46).

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again cult images abstracted from narrative. The Pietà, showing the dead Christ lying limp in the lap of his m ­ other, was abstracted from the narrative of the lamentation over his dead body ­after its deposition from the cross. The Man of Sorrows is harder to place within a narrative context: it also shows the body of Christ ­after the crucifixion, displaying his wounds, but alive, sometimes seated on his sarcophagus, sometimes shown as only a bust, neither glorified nor in majesty, decidedly a suffering Christ who, alive, brings the pain of his death before the eyes of the viewer.102 The third novelty in late medieval devotion, the “Veronica,” was the face of Christ which according to legend had been imprinted on Veronica’s veil when she touched it to his head on the way to his crucifixion. In this case the legend itself, an apocryphal outgrowth of the story of Christ carry­ing his cross to Calvary, is precisely about the fixing of narrative flow in an iconic repre­sen­ta­tion.103 To call all t­ hese repre­sen­ta­tions cult images is to say not only that they represent static moments abstracted from narrative but that they are devotional foci. The figures look not at other characters in a narrative frame, but outward at the pious viewer, and the viewer is expected to be devotionally engaged with the sacred personages. Familiar prayers and antiphons such as the “Ave Maria” and the “Salve regina” w ­ ere structured as greetings, the antiphon “Ave regina celorum” is a concatenation of salutations, and while all t­ hese ­were addressed to the Virgin, “Salve sancta facies” was addressed to Christ. T ­ hese prayers and antiphons could be said or sung, and no doubt often ­were said as salutations to the figures represented in images.104 Fra Angelico’s wall painting of the Annunciation at San Marco in Florence bears an inscription urging the viewer not to neglect greeting the Virgin.105 An image produced in three-­dimensional form could be not only greeted but manipulated devotionally, as Gertrude did. Statues of 102. ​On the pietà, see Joanna E. Ziegler, Sculpture of Compassion: The Pietà and the Beguines in the Southern Low Countries, c. 1300–­c. 1600 (Brussels and Rome: Institut Historique Belge de Rome, 1992); and Georg Satzinger and Hans-­Joachim Ziegeler, “Marienklagen und Pietà,” in Die Passion Christi in Literatur und Kunst des Spätmittelalters, ed. Walter Haug and Burghart Wachinger (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1993), 241–76. On the Man of Sorrows, see Catherine R. Puglisi and William L. Barcham, eds., New Perspectives on the Man of Sorrows (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2013); and Flora Lewis, “Rewarding Devotion: Indulgences and the Promotion of Images,” Studies in Church History 28 (1992): 178–94. The lit­er­a­ture on Passion devotion and Passion meditations is extensive, but one might begin with A. A. MacDonald, H. N. B. Ridderbos, and R. M. Schlusemann, eds., The Broken Body: Passion Devotion in Late-­ Medieval Culture (Groningen: Forsten, 1998), and Maureen B. M. Boulton, trans., Piety and Persecution in the French Texts of E­ ngland (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Re­nais­sance Studies, 2013). 103. ​Ewa Kuryluk, Veronica and Her Cloth: History, Symbolism, and Structure of a “True” Image (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991). 104. ​Rachel Fulton Brown, Mary and the Art of Prayer: The Hours of the Virgin in Medieval Christian Life and Thought (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), 56–71. 105. ​William Hood, Fra Angelico at San Marco (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), 262, 276–77.



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the infant Christ w ­ ere also handled devotionally, laid in a cradle, taken out, clothed, and fondled.106 When an image was fixed in a public space, w ­ hether in a church or along a roadside, the initial and perhaps primary response to encountering it would be a greeting, neglect of which might seem a snub. Christ might be taken as ubiquitously pre­sent, but an image gave that presence tangible manifestation, and ­because the images serving that function w ­ ere specific to par­tic­u­lar moments in Christ’s life, it would be Christ at ­those moments who was projected into the lives of the late medieval devout. Gertrude held that a person gazing at the crucifix should think of Christ speaking to her, and indeed she seems often to have had the experience of the Crucified addressing her.107 Lukardis of Oberweimar (ca. 1262–1309) was also devoted to Christ crucified, and on two occasions she experienced the corpus on the cross come to life; once he stretched out his right arm and took her hand, while on another occasion he asked her help in reattaching an arm that had come loose.108 For Margaret Ebner the real­ity of Christ’s presence was so powerfully mediated by crucifixes that encountering one could be profoundly painful for her.109 When Angela of Foligno reflected on the suffering of Christ, she pictured a kind of spiritualized physicality that is prob­ably conditioned by her prayer in front of a crucifix. She prayed for forgiveness, absolution, and a blessing, and what blessed her was “the flesh of the hand that was crucified on the cross.”110 More strikingly, Christ embraced her soul “with the very arm with which he was crucified.”111 His corporeal arm embraced not her body but her soul. With her spiritual senses she perceived a bodily arm embracing her soul, presumably from within the very soul that was ­here embraced. Stories of this sort might provoke re­sis­tance and critique, particularly from observers who feared that devotional images could breed idolatry.112 But what is an idol? Traditionally it is a dumb block of wood or stone mistakenly thought to be animated by a deity. Across many cultures ­there are ceremonies 106. ​Rosemary Drage Hale, “Rocking the Cradle: Margaretha Ebner (Be)Holds the Divine,” in Per­ for­mance and Transformation: New Approaches to Late Medieval Spirituality, ed. Mary A. Suydam and Joanna E. Ziegler (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999), 211–39; Rosemary Hale, “Imitatio Mariae: Motherhood Motifs in Devotional Memoirs,” in Medieval German Lit­er­a­ture, ed. Albrecht Classen (Göppingen: Kümmerle, 1989), 129–45. 107. ​LDP 3.41.2–3 (Barratt, 137); 3.32.1–2, p. 136; LDP 1.42.1, p. 139. 108. ​VLSW c. 7, p. 314; c. 50, pp. 336–37. 109. ​ME p. 111; cf. pp. 127, 133, 146. 110. ​AF Memoriale, c. 6, p. 268 (Lachance, 172). 111. ​AF Memoriale, c. 6, p. 276 (Lachance, 175): “Christus intus in me amplexabatur animam cum illo brachio cum quo fuit crucifixus.” 112. ​Michael Camille, The Gothic Idol: Ideology and Image-­Making in Medieval Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).

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for consecrating images and calling spirits to be pre­sent in them.113 In late medieval piety, however, an image did not need to be consecrated or animated to serve as the vehicle for a sacred presence if that presence was already presupposed and if the function of the image was not to generate the presence but to give it concrete manifestation. For ­those who held to a purer, more abstract religion, ­these images might always be seen as idols. But it does make a difference ­whether the deity is seen as distinctively or even uniquely pre­sent in some image. If that is the case, then the image becomes the only means of access to divine presence. If the deity is recognized as ubiquitously pre­sent, and if the image is only an aid to recognition of that presence, it does not as clearly count as an idol. But how can we know which was the case? T ­ hose who became habituated to perceiving presence concretized in images could easily begin to expect presence only when it was thus manifested. This is not the same as denying in princi­ple that it can be in­de­pen­dent of the images, but in practice the distinction may be impossible to draw. Prayers, meditations, and images, separately or in combination, w ­ ere aids meant to stimulate consciousness of a presence that might be presupposed, activating at least potentially an intuitive sense of that presence through devotional engagement. The exercises themselves w ­ ere seldom much dif­fer­ent from ­those of ordinary pious Christians. The presupposition of presence was also ordinary. What was exceptional was the degree to which the stimulus worked in activating not only an intuition but often a perception of that presence.

Conclusion The Spanish mystics of the sixteenth ­century are well known for their exploration of the types or levels of mystical prayer, and the terms they used, such as Teresa of Ávila’s “prayer of recollection,” “prayer of quiet,” and “prayer of ­union,” might suggest that high levels of spiritual attainment can be reached only through rare and special prayer techniques.114 The late medieval texts that narrate the mystical presence of Christ say ­little or nothing about such specialized forms of prayer. They do say that awareness of Christ’s presence was commonly sparked or contextualized by prayer, but the prayers used w ­ ere no dif­fer­ent from t­hose of other committed late medieval Christians, and in fact 113. ​David Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). 114. ​For one discussion of the m ­ atter, see Thomas Dubay, Fire Within: St. Teresa of Avila, St. John of the Cross, and the Gospel, on Prayer (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1989).



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­ ere often shared with ­others. In general they ­were straightforward and often w brief. No doubt the ­women who reported experience of Christ being pre­sent to them prayed with more than usual intensity, but the prayers they used kept them grounded in a widely shared religious culture. Of course two p­ eople reading the same text—­a prayer or meditation, a poem or novel—­may experience and respond to it very differently, and no doubt that happened to t­ hese late medieval praying Christians, especially if their subcultures conditioned them to experience and talk about their prayer in dramatic ways. But the texts themselves, the prayers they used, ­were monuments of ordinary piety.

C h a p te r   5

Liturgy and Presence

Liturgy was central to the lives of cloistered ­women. As Claire Jones has pointed out with re­spect to the Dominican nuns, liturgy was not simply one of their responsibilities, as was the case for friars, but the primary focus of their communal life, and in the sister-­books regular observance of the liturgy was a fundamentally impor­tant commitment.1 Liturgy was something ordinary, part of the daily routine of ordinary nuns and the weekly routine of ordinary Christians, but it could also be a stimulus to more exceptional forms of religious perception.2 Liturgy is more than anything e­ lse the evocation of presence: presence of a person, presence of events, and presence of a person enacting and recalling events. A formula from a Mozarabic missal captures this sense of liturgy when it addresses Christ in ­these terms: “Be pre­sent, be pre­sent in our midst, O Jesus, good high priest, as you w ­ ere pre­sent in the midst of your disciples.”3 But if he is pre­sent now as he was then, when precisely was that original presence? 1. ​Claire Taylor Jones, Ruling the Spirit: ­Women, Liturgy, and Dominican Reform in Late Medieval Germany (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017). 2. ​P. Camporesi, “The Consecrated Host: A Wondrous Excess,” in Fragments for a History of the ­Human Body, ed. Michel Feher, Ramona Naddaff, and Nadia Tazi (New York: Zone, 1989), 220–37. 3. ​ Liturgia mozarabica secundum regulam Beati Isidori, in Patrologia latina, 85 (Paris: Migne, 1862), col. 116 (“Adesto, adesto”). Used in The Book of Common Prayer (New York: Seabury Press, 1979), 834 (prayer No. 66, before receiving communion). 16 6



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That question calls for more than one answer. The mass is on one level a reenactment of the Last Supper, the meal on Maundy Thursday at which Christ instituted the Eucharist. When the priest takes the bread and wine and says the words of institution in the person of Christ, consecrating them to be the body and blood of Christ, the Last Supper is made pre­sent. To speak of the mass or the sacrament offered in the mass as “Eucharist” or “thanksgiving” is to assimilate it to the meal at which Christ offered thanks to the F ­ ather: “Having taken bread, and having given thanks [eucharistēsas], he broke it and gave to them, saying, This is my body” (Luke 22:19). On a second level, it is the crucifixion or Good Friday that is made pre­sent, b­ ecause the bloody sacrifice of Calvary was relived or made pre­sent at each mass as an unbloody sacrifice.4 Christ at the Last Supper might allude to his imminent death, but at the mass both the time of anticipation and the time of realization are made pre­sent. In late medieval legend and art the making-­present of Christ’s death was forcefully expressed in the iconographic motif known as the Mass of Saint Gregory, which depicted a miracle in which the suffering Christ is supposed to have become miraculously manifested on the altar during mass.5 This was the conception of the mass most prominent in late medieval piety. But on a third level the mass is also a making-­present of the resurrection. In one of the apparitions of Christ, which occurred at Emmaus on the eve­ning ­after the resurrection, he was recognized “in the breaking of the bread” (Luke 24:13–35), and this apparition set the pre­ ce­dent for recognition of ­every Sunday’s eucharistic breaking of the bread as a cele­bration of the resurrection.6 If Christ dwells in a kind of transtemporal eternity, both outside of time and within time, accessible in all time and appearing at any time,7 then the resurrected Christ can be pre­sent at each mass as at 4. ​C. W. Dugmore, The Mass and the En­glish Reformers (London: Macmillan, 1958), 21–22, 35, 60– 63, traces a line of development from Ambrose’s “realistic” understanding of the eucharistic sacrifice, to medieval notions of the mystical “re-­immolation of Christ at e­ very mass” in an unbloody sacrifice, to Thomas Aquinas’s understanding of the sacrament as representative of and partaking in the fruit of the Passion, and to late medieval conceptions of the mass as “a distinct sacrifice in itself which does not derive its sacrificial character from its relation to the sacrifice of the Cross.” 5. ​Miri Rubin, Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 120–22, 308–10; Caroline Walker Bynum, “Seeing and Seeing Beyond: The Mass of St. Gregory in the Fifteenth ­Century,” in The Mind’s Eye: Art and Theological Argument in the ­Middle Ages, ed. Jeffrey Hamburger and Anne-­Marie Bouché (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2005), 208–40. 6. ​Craig Harline, Sunday: A History of the First Day from Babylonia to the Super Bowl (New York: Doubleday, 2007), 10, 14. 7. ​Theologians from Albert the ­Great onward spoke of the aevum of “aeviternity” as the condition of saints and angels in heaven; see Henryk Anzulewicz, “Aeternitas—­aevum—­tempus: The Concept of Time in the System of Albert the ­Great,” in The Medieval Concept of Time: Studies on the Scholastic Debate and Its Reception in Early Modern Philosophy, ed. Pasquale Porro (Leiden: Brill, 2001), 83–129. That is at least approximately what transtemporal eternity means ­here, but the main point for our purposes is not the relationship between simultaneity and duration in heaven, but the capacity of a being who dwells outside of time to enter into time.

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Emmaus. On yet a fourth level, the liturgy is governed by a liturgical calendar, and in the “temporal cycle” of feasts pertaining to the life of Christ the events of his life are thought of as pre­sent ­here and now: Christ is born “­today,” or Christ is presented in the T ­ emple “­today.”8 In short, Christ is pre­sent in drama through the reenactment of the Last Supper, in sacrifice through the unbloody making-­present of his bloody sacrifice on the cross, in realization as in the post-­resurrection apparitions, and in commemoration through the liturgical observance of the temporal cycle of feasts related to his historical life. All four of ­these re-­presentations are relevant to the presence of Christ as recounted in late medieval texts, but the fourth, which does not so clearly imply literal presence, is on that account less significant than it might at first seem to be. Christophany often occurs in the setting of liturgy, where it is almost always in the form of vision (not only locution) and in one way or other involves or relates to the community (not merely a privileged individual). But the first three re-­presentations, not clearly distinguished from each other, are by far more prominent than the fourth. One might expect the events of the liturgical year to be more in the forefront, given their centrality in the proper of the liturgy, but reliving the full cycle of Christ’s life tends to be experienced more as commemoration than as literal transfer of or entry into the events. Primarily, in the texts we are dealing with, while Christ is manifested as he would have been in his infancy or at his death, the events of his life and death are less often played out in full, and the feasts of the liturgical year become occasions for consciousness of manifestation in the pre­sent more than opportunities for entry into the historical past.9 The late medieval person does not so much experience retrojection into the historical past, and Christ’s projection from the past into the pre­sent is subordinated to his entry from eternity into time.

The Presence of Christ in the Liturgy What it could mean for Christophany to occur in a liturgical context can be seen from the revelations of Friedrich Sunder (1254–1328), chaplain at Engelthal, and Adelheid Langmann (1306–1375), who became a nun at the 8. ​The function of par­tic­u­lar feasts as making-­present of biblical events is clearest from antiphons such as “Hodie Christus natus est” (for the Nativity), “Hodie beata Virgo” (for the Purification), and “Hodie completi sunt” (for Pentecost). 9. ​For a full and insightful discussion of t­ hese themes, with specific reference to the community at Helfta, see Anna Harrison, “Thousands and Thousands of Lovers”: Sense of Community among the Nuns of Helfta (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press/Cistercian Publications, 2022), chap. 4.



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same monastery and might perhaps have been entering the community as he was being carried out for burial.10 Both had experiences of Christ’s presence that tended to occur within a liturgical context, but differently so. One might expect Sunder’s encounters with Christ to be ­those of a priest standing at the altar and Langmann’s to be the characteristic experiences of a nun situated in the choir, and this is in fact the case, but it is only the most obvious point of contrast. It might be fitting to say that Langmann’s revelations are more extensively liturgical, but Sunder’s are more intensively so: t­ here is far more liturgical reference in Langmann’s account, but the connection between revelation and liturgy runs deeper in Sunder’s experience. In both cases t­ here is a tendency to state the liturgical occasion on which a revelation occurred, but Langmann’s account is far more consistent in naming the feast: Trinity Sunday, the Sunday before the Nativity, Holy Innocents, Candlemas, the eve or the feast of Saint Peter Martyr, and so forth. Sometimes the revelation is integrally linked with liturgical occasion, as when at Pentecost Christ sent Pentecostal fire that raged all around Langmann. More often the connection is less clear. Langmann’s revelations are also far more clearly linked with par­tic­u­lar liturgical ser­vices. Her experiences may come at vespers, or ­after compline. At mass, they occur most often at moments of choral chant: at the Gloria, the Sanctus, the Agnus Dei, the sequence. On one occasion Christ came to her during a sermon and said he too wished to preach to her, for she held him captive like a virgin who held her lover bound in a bower. ­After explicating the allegory, Christ assured her he had not distracted her from the parallel public sermon, b­ ecause it too was about her and him. When she asked the preacher the theme of his sermon, he confirmed that he had preached about Christ and her.11 In the case of Sunder, his revelations are often explic­itly about the liturgy and Sunder’s role in it. Christ came to him e­ very day when he celebrated mass, although he thought himself unworthy. Did he come to prop up Sunder’s weak belief ? No, Christ answered, he knew Sunder’s faith was strong; he came to him during the mass simply out of love. Repeatedly Sunder asked Christ ­whether he should celebrate mass, or which mass he should say. On one occasion he noted that he was aware of the received liturgical customs, but still 10. ​For background see Leonard Patrick Hindsley, The Mystics of Engelthal: Writings from a Medieval Monastery (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 1998), 49–64 (on Langmann), 126–37 (on her twelfth-­ century sources), and 109 (on Sunder). 11. ​Philipp Strauch, ed., Die Offenbarungen der Adelheid Langmann, Klosterfrau zu Engelthal (Strasbourg: Trübner, 1878), 26–27. On the prob­lems with Strauch’s editorial practice see Hindsley, The Mystics of Engelthal, 55–58; Rabia Gregory, Marrying Jesus in Medieval and Early Modern Northern Eu­rope: Popu­lar Culture and Religious Reform (Farnham: Ashgate, 2016), 174.

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he wanted to know what mass to say, presumably ­because votive masses ­were among the options. The sense of connectedness to Christ seems to have been most forceful, however, when Sunder held the consecrated host in his hands and it spoke to him. From out of the host, Christ would speak sometimes in rhymes, or he would urge Sunder to hold him up at the elevation, showing him to his friends, or (depending on who was in the congregation) to his friends and enemies. If Sunder paused to contemplate the awesome divine presence, Christ might urge him, speaking from the host, to eat him and nourish his soul, and speaking from the chalice he might say to drink him as a source of life for his soul.12 Rarely was real presence quite so real. The most basic message of the revelations imparted during liturgy was one of Christ’s presence within the liturgical cele­bration, which means, most obviously, his presence in the transubstantiated ele­ments, the consecrated bread and wine. The ­sisters of Katharinental had frequent revelatory experiences connected with the Eucharist. Experience directly inspired by the consecrated host could be similar to that associated with a crucifix: the object itself was visually ordinary, but it spoke. Thus, Elsbeth of Stoffeln united her heart entirely with God, and she beheld Christ; he spoke to her from the host in the priest’s hands, saying, “Look at me, and gaze upon me with longing, for you ­will behold my divine face eternally as you desire with all your heart.”13 The nuns of Adelhausen w ­ ere also among ­those who experienced eucharistic mir14 acles. ­After communion, Christ might appear in the midst of the s­ isters as a man of thirty years or as a striking lordly figure who gazed upon them with fondness corresponding to their moral worth. Again at communion one s­ ister of Adelhausen saw the hosts shining with a wondrous light, she perceived how Christ’s divinity shone through his humanity, and she saw t­ hose who received communion shining with the same light.15 Other visions outside the mass might still be reminiscent of eucharistic presence. When Adelheit of St. Gallen was sick in bed, she saw Christ come to her, sit at the foot of the bed, and take a bit of flesh from his own hand, putting it into her mouth, and saying, “This is my flesh and my blood”; then he vanished.16 When Gertrut die Rittrin had a temptation against the faith, Christ came to her with a golden chalice, accompanied by two youthful fig12. ​“Das Gnaden-­Leben des Friedrich Sunder, Klosterkaplan zu Engelthal,” in Siegfried Ringler, Viten-­und Offenbarungsliteratur in Frauenklöstern des Mittelalters (Munich: Artemis, 1980), 404–5. While unexpectedly contextualized, the commands from Christ are derived from the gospel injunctions (Matthew 26:26–27, “take and eat . . . ​drink of it all of you”). 13. ​SB Katharinental, 118. 14. ​SB Adelhausen, 167, 173. 15. ​SB Adelhausen, 171, 177, 184. 16. ​SB Katharinental, 105.



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ures with lighted candles, and he poured blood from his heart into the chalice, bade her drink, and said she should not be unbelieving, which caused the temptation to go away.17 In all ­these cases the exceptional manifestation of Christ ratified belief in his eucharistic presence, which was miraculous but not exceptional. The liturgical making-­present of Christ’s sacrificial death, miraculously confirmed in the Mass of Saint Gregory, could be represented in starkly realistic terms. A nun of Unterlinden began to meditate on the Passion during the liturgy, and when the time came at which “the priest immolates the saving victim to the ­Father” she began to hear sensibly the blows of hammers that Christ endured on the cross, and many other sufferings of his w ­ ere shown to her, as though he w ­ ere undergoing them then and t­ here. When the liturgy was finished she hastened from the choir, seeking a private place where she could cry and moan, outwardly expressing her inner sorrows, but at the exit from the choir she fainted for grief, as Mary was often thought to have done at her son’s crucifixion, and fell lifeless on the stone floor, and had to be taken to the infirmary like a dead ­woman.18 In this case sacrificial presence is also dramatic presence. It is not only in the consecrated ele­ments that Christ is taken to be pre­sent, however, but in the liturgy as a w ­ hole. On Easter, Mechthild of Hackeborn was very weak but still participated in a pro­cession, with the aid of her fellow nuns and a staff, and she saw Christ vested in a dalmatic and walking alongside each person in the pro­cession. ­Others might see Christ himself celebrating mass, along with John the Evangelist and o ­ thers in the altar party.19 Christ appeared to Gertrude of Helfta as a vested bishop seated on his throne against the wall, facing the altar, but he explained that he was not ­limited to that location: if he filled heaven and earth ( Jeremiah 23:24), then all the more he filled the space of that building.20 Christ was seen amid all the chanting of the liturgy and sometimes aiding it. On the feast of the Ascension the nuns of Helfta sang an antiphon with the words “With hands raised he was borne into heaven and blessed them, alleluia,” and as they chanted, Christ appeared “as if from above in the air” and blessed the assembly. When they sang on Pentecost, Gertrude saw Christ acting out the works of the Spirit. When she was unable to sing on account of infirmity, Christ 17. ​SB Katharinental, 101. 18. ​SB Unterlinden, 414–15; the key phrases are “sacerdos inmolat Patri hostiam salutarem” and “tamquam in presenti Christum cerneret pacientem.” 19. ​LSG 1.19, Newman, p. 78; Gertrud Jaron Lewis, By ­Women, for W ­ omen, about W ­ omen: The Sister-­ Books of Fourteenth-­Century Germany (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1996), 231–32; SB Unterlinden, 231–32 (incident with Christ as celebrant and Virgin and Gabriel assisting, 442–43). 20. ​LSG 4.59, p. 287.

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offered to exchange roles and do the chanting for her.21 He also offered instruction on proper cele­bration of the liturgy, calling special attention to par­tic­u­lar words, recommending sevenfold recitation of Psalm 29 on Fridays, having the nuns interpolate a Pater Noster into the Sanctus and a formula of praise between the postcommunion and the collect.22 As Gertrude was preparing for matins on Easter, she asked Christ to instruct her how to sing the Alleluia with devotion. He first told her she could sing it in ­union with ­those who sing it in heaven. He then explained that the word contains all vowels except “O,” which signifies sorrow. She should sing the first “A” in praise of his divinized and now resurrected humanity, the “E” in praise of the delight his h ­ uman eyes encountered “in the flowery meadows of the sovereign and undivided Trinity,” the “U” in praise of the delight his ­human ears experienced in heaven, the “I” in praise of the delight that met his h ­ uman nostrils, and the final “A” in praise again of 23 his divinized humanity. The sister-­books also link revelatory experience with liturgical chant: visions occur during the singing of a sequence, a responsory, or other texts,24 although in the sister-­books revelations often occur not during liturgy and not on special feasts, but as the Nativity was approaching, or ­after mass, between prime and matins, ­after compline, and most often ­after matins.25 One of the richest sources for the role of liturgical ­music in evoking mystical and visionary experience is the vita of Christina of Hane, in which, as Racha Kirakosian has shown, the sensory stimulus of the liturgy creates a synaesthesia that “becomes a twofold expression of the soul’s u ­ nion with God, as a u ­ nion that is internal as well as external.”26 As we have seen, Meister Eckhart speaks of a ­union with God that is closer than that of body and soul, closer than a drop of ­water in a cask of wine,27 which sounds like a truly extraordinary experience, which one might expect of only the greatest saints. The image of the drop of ­water in a vessel of wine is traditional imagery for mystical u ­ nion of the soul with God.28 But Eckhart is 21. ​LDP 4.36.5 (Barratt, 177–78); 4.37.7, p. 185; 4.14, pp. 81–82. 22. ​LSG 1.16 (Newman, 67); 1.18 (Newman, 75); 1.5 (Newman, 46). By the end of a year she would have said as many verses as he had wounds. 23. ​LDP 4.27.4 (Barratt, 147–48). 24. ​SB Katharinental, 125, 133, 138. 25. ​SB Unterlinden, 367, 390, 402, 408, 416, 430, 436, 453, 469, 460; Anna von Munzingen, “Die Chronik der Anna von Munzingen, nach der ältesten Abschrift mit Einleitung und Beilagen,” ed. J. König, Freiburger Diözesan-­Archiv 13 (1880): 168; SB Engelthal, 39. 26. ​Racha Kirakosian, “Musical Heaven and Heavenly ­Music: At the Crossroads of Liturgical ­Music and Mystical Texts,” Viator 48, no. 1 (2017): 124. 27. ​Counsel 20, in Meister Eckhart, The Essential Sermons, Commentaries, Treatises, and Defense, trans. Edmund Colledge and Bernard McGinn (New York: Paulist, 1981), 272. 28. ​Robert E. Lerner, “The Image of Mixed Liquids in Late Medieval Mystical Thought,” Church History 40 (1971): 397–411.



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speaking of what happens routinely when a person receives communion. He imagines his hearers protesting that they feel nothing of the sort, but Eckhart insists that receiving communion truly does involve such u ­ nion, ­whether it is felt or not. The liturgical visions in the convent lit­er­at­ ure make a similar point in dif­fer­ent terms. They tell of liturgical events in which Christ is routinely pre­ sent in the sacrament and in the ser­vice, and by narrating exceptional manifestations of that presence, they give vivid expression to the ordinary presence, which is just as wondrous even when it is not manifest.

Virgin and Child Pre­sent in the Liturgy Visions of Christ as a young child often occurred in a liturgical setting, perhaps suggesting a parallel between Christ’s entry into the world in his incarnation and his sacramental entry. (This link is at least implied in the sixth chapter of John’s gospel, where the Christ who came down from heaven referred to himself as the bread that, like manna, comes down from heaven.) Anna of Klingenow’s vision of the child standing on an altar is depicted in the initial that begins the account of her piety in the sister-­book of Töss (figure 4); she appears lost in prayer, perhaps suggesting that she sees Christ with her spiritual rather than bodily eyes.29 Adelheid Langmann’s most memorable experience of the child Christ came during the mass and gave rise to feelings of apprehension for fear of deception. When the nuns received communion one day, she begged him to show himself to her, but he refused. The next day, however, during mass, he appeared during the gospel reading in the form of a child on the altar, then he leaped off and went about the choir stalls, greeting and hugging all his friends. Then he leaped back onto the altar, and when the priest elevated the host, he changed himself into the host. L ­ ater in the mass he came back as a four-­year-­old boy and ran up to Langmann, hugging and kissing her, then ran back up to the altar, leaped back and resumed hugging and kissing. At this point she abruptly resisted him, saying that perhaps he was not Christ a­ fter all. But he showed her his hands and feet and side, which proved his identity. (Entering time from eternity, he could manifest himself with attributes of infancy and Passion si­mul­ta­neously.) She asked his forgiveness and his blessing. He raised his right hand and made the sign of the cross over her, saying, as in post-­resurrection apparitions, “Peace be with you,” then vanished.30 The experience was so intensely thrilling that its 29. ​Jane Carroll, “Subversive Obedience: Images of Spiritual Reform by and for Fifteenth-­Century Nuns,” in Reassessing the Roles of W ­ omen as ‘Makers’ of Medieval Art and Architecture, ed. Therese Martin (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 731–33. 30. ​Strauch, Die Offenbarungen der Adelheid Langmann, 18–19. Cf. Luke 24:36 and John 20:26.

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Figure 4.  Anna of Klingenow’s vision of child Christ on an altar, from Elsbeth Stagel, Das Leben der Schwestern zu Töß (The life of the ­Sisters at Töss), Stadtbibliothek im Bildungscampus Nürnberg, Cent. V, 10, f. 29v, ca. 1450–1470.

emotional impact became insufferable, and doubts welled up not about the propriety of carry­ing on with so young a child but of carry­ing on with an apparition that might prove false, presumably demonic. And of course this suspicion would arise, if for no other reason, simply b­ ecause the intense emotions w ­ ere themselves overwhelming and threatened to explode in a disarray that could only with difficulty be seen as divine in origin. In the context of the liturgy especially, the child Christ is often accompanied by his ­mother. To be sure, the capacity to be mystically pre­sent at any moment, to enter from eternity into time, is a prerogative of divinity, which should not strictly speaking apply to the Virgin Mary, yet she appears in the sources with such frequency that she seems to share in that privilege. She appears specifically as the b­ earer of her son, not by herself. And the expectation of her appearing with him was surely encouraged by the wide familiarity with statues of Virgin and Child in which their joint presence could find concrete manifestation.



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At Helfta, Christ and the Virgin are at times seen pre­sent within the choir during ser­vices.31 At the end of matins, when Mechthild as chantress is to sing “Benedicamus” with the other nuns, she has the Virgin intone two lines, and the angels and saints respond.32 When the nuns are receiving communion, she has a vision in which the communicants join with Christ and the Virgin at a huge ­table, where Christ gives each person a piece of bread broken into five morsels.33 On the feast of the Assumption, the nuns go out of the choir in pro­ cession, then return singing a Marian antiphon, and Gertrude has a vision of all heaven dancing as they chant, then the Virgin stands with Christ before the altar, facing the congregation, and with each phrase of the antiphon she receives the praise of the saints, hands out lilies, leans against Christ’s chest, places a garland around his neck and caresses him, all while acknowledging and praying for the assembled community.34 In all ­these cases the basic point is the intersection of Christ’s exceptional personal presence to Mechthild with his ordinary liturgical presence, in liturgical space, to the community. In t­hese cases, however, it is Christ as an adult who appears along with his ­mother, not the child Christ. Apparitions of the Virgin with her son as a child, often in a liturgical setting, are still more frequent in the sister-­books. Roughly a third of the time in the sister-­books, apparitions of the child are joint appearances of the Virgin together with her child. H ­ ere perhaps most clearly visionary experience draws on a visual culture shared within and beyond the monastery, in which statues of the Virgin and child (like crucifixes) would have been seen on all sides. One nun at Engelthal was accustomed to entering the chapel gladly, day and night, b­ ecause in it the Virgin and child appeared to her, an impression surely facilitated by the presence of at least one image, perhaps several.35 During the singing of the “Salve regina,” Else of Holczhausen sometimes saw the Virgin and child hovering over the assembly of nuns.36 While the antiphon “Salve regina” was being sung in the convent at Weiler, the Virgin came into the s­ isters’ choir with the child on her arm and placed it down at the entrance to the choir stalls. As the s­ isters sang the words “et Jesum benedictum fructum ventris tui,” the child went about embracing the nuns, who bowed as the liturgical customs of the order prescribed.37 31. ​LSG 1.4 (Newman, 42); LSG 1.12 (Newman, 60); LDP 4.3.6 (Barratt, 24). 32. ​LSG 1.12 (Newman, 61). 33. ​LSG 1.26 (Newman, 100). 34. ​LDP 4.48.22 (Barratt, 233–34). 35. ​SB Engelthal, 27. 36. ​SB Kirchberg, 108. 37. ​SB Weiler, 84.

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Especially when said or sung in the presence of an image of the Virgin and child, ­these salutations would naturally have enhanced a sense that the image gave concrete manifestation to what would in any case have been taken for granted, that Christ and his ­mother ­were spiritually alive and pre­sent.38 Two accounts suggest that Mary could be perceived as the God-­bearer in the sense that she held a functional role: the s­ isters ­were pleased to see her, but it was the child they r­ eally wanted. When Mary came to one s­ ister without her child, a s­ ister said, “O lady, where is your child? Go right away and bring him to me.” Afterward, in Advent, Mary seemed to come with her child and set it in the s­ ister’s arms. Another story shows greater tension and anxiety. Els of Sehssencham of Engelthal came in a vision to a wondrous place, where ­there was a beautiful maiden who played with the child Christ. Els would have been pleased if the child had shown ­favor ­toward her, but he did not, which left her deeply aggrieved. The child appeared to her afterward and said, “Should a child not show f­ avor to his m ­ other before giving graces to you? She is my m ­ other!” Only then did her grief abate.39 She might have expected the Virgin and child in the manner of a cult image, both accessible to her in reciprocal gaze, but instead she witnessed a narrative scene in which Virgin and child interacted with each other, and her privilege was not to enter into the interaction but simply to witness it. The tension and even rivalry with the Virgin is yet more poignant in the case of a nun at Gotteszell, who once lay on her bed, sorrowing and without comfort, when the most beautiful child ever seen came to her. He was not yet able to walk, so he crawled to the infirmary on all fours u ­ ntil he came to her and then sat on her bed. He asked her what she wanted, and she asked for some firewood, ­because the weather was bitterly cold. And while she was enjoying herself with the child, along came the most beautiful w ­ oman ever seen and took the child from her, saying she wanted to go up to the chapel where the nuns w ­ ere to receive communion. Deeply disturbed to have the child taken away, the s­ ister cried out repeatedly for the child’s return. When the nuns passed by on their way to their meal, she cried out in alarm, insisting t­hese ­were the thieves who had taken the child away from her. Afterward she asked her attendant to put something special on her dish that the child might like to eat if it should come back to her. And whenever a beautiful ­woman with a child came into the monastery, and was brought to her bed, the nuns asked her if this was the ­woman, and if her child was that child. “No, my ­woman 38. ​Cf. Acta sanctorum, April, vol. 3 (Antwerp: Michaelis Cnobarus, 1675), 688–89; Stephan Beissel, Geschichte der Verehrung Marias in Deutschland während des Mittelalters: Ein Beitrag zur Religionswissenschaft und Kunstgeschichte (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 1909), 211. 39. ​SB Töss, 88; SB Engelthal, 29.



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and her child are like none other.”40 In this case the questions raised by the other nuns suggest that they ­were humoring the visionary, thinking she had mistaken some normal visitors for an apparition, but that is not explic­itly said. More typically the Virgin was generous with her child and his ­favors. She appeared often with her child to a ten-­year-­old girl living at Adelhausen, and she beckoned with her hand for the girl to approach, saying to her, “I want to give you my child.” She brought the newborn child on Christmas to Adelheit of Hiltegarthausen and laid it before her on her bed. And she gave a s­ ister of Töss the privilege of suckling from her breast, ­because with her ­g reat devotion to Christ’s childhood she had figuratively helped her care for the child.41 In an e­ arlier generation Richard of Saint-­Victor had argued that God must be triune and not merely dual—­that ­there must be not just the F ­ ather and the Son, but also the Spirit—­because the love between two persons is perfected only in their willingness to accommodate and share that love with a third.42 It is unlikely that the s­ isters in t­ hese German monasteries had Richard’s Trinitology in mind, but ­there is something analogous implicit in ­these stories. The love between m ­ other and child is what the ubiquitous imagery would have impressed upon the ­sisters, but if that love was perfect, it must be capable of extending itself, and the ­sisters who cultivated intense devotion to both child and m ­ other clearly sought to claim their part in that sharing, even if at times they recognized their claim as a daring one that might seem presumptuous. Two narratives from Adelhausen are particularly striking for their focus first on the Virgin herself before and a­ fter childbearing, second on the child whose preternatural maturity manifests his newly incarnate divinity. One s­ ister saw the Virgin g­ oing through the choir one Christmas at compline, as large as a ­woman about to give birth, but the next morning she was again in the choir among the nuns, and she was carry­ing her son in her arms, offering him to each of the s­ isters. During the “Salve Regina,” she went through the stalls on ­either side of the choir and bowed to each of the ­sisters according to her merit. Again one Christmas another ­sister wished to see Christ as he was when first born, and with that thought in mind she saw Christ come from the altar as a newborn child wearing a silk shirt. He went through the choir, among the ­sisters, and came to this ­sister, who held him all through the mass. When the mass was over, the child went back up on the altar, and she saw him no more. 40. ​SB Gotteszell, 145–46. 41. ​SB Adelhausen, 172; SB Töss, 54. 42. ​Richard of St. Victor, “The Trinity,” 3.11–20, in The Twelve Patriarchs, The Mystical Ark, Book Three of the Trinity, trans. Grover A. Zinn (New York: Paulist, 1979), 384–93; Nico den Bok, Communicating the Most High: A Systematic Study of Person and Trinity in the Theology of Richard of St. Victor (Paris: Brepols, 1996).

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The exceptional manifestation receded, folding back into the more ordinary miracle of Christ’s eucharistic presence on the altar.43 Presence within the liturgy means presence in liturgical space—­most obviously at the altar, but also the stalls in which the choir nuns gathered for ser­ vices.44 ­Either or both of two liturgical spaces may play an impor­tant role: the infant often comes from the altar, as if his presence t­ here is a visionary echo of his eucharistic presence, and he often comes to the s­ isters in their stalls, blessing and embracing each of them in turn.45 In the Töss sister-­book Christ follows one ­sister from the altar to her stall, while in another case he comes and embraces the nuns in their stalls seriatim. At Katharinental, too, a ­sister saw Mary with Christ in her arms go through the choir during matins, while a Marian antiphon was sung; Mary bowed to each s­ ister, and she gave the child on her arm to each of the choir nuns.46 The transition might have been easy and natu­ral if the nuns ­were in stalls at the east end of the chapel, but often the nuns’ choir was in a gallery at the west end of the chapel.47 The choir stalls could become semi-­private spaces, stocked with paraphernalia for devotions that might be loosely linked to the liturgy but might distract from it, as the fifteenth-­century reformers noted to their dismay.48 And while the apparitions w ­ ere sometimes of the child Christ blessing or embracing the nuns generally, they could just as well involve private devotional encounters. Elisabet Bechlin at Töss thought she saw Christ as a ­little child coming to her from the altar and sitting by her. She snatched him and set him on her lap, and she treated him as kindly as she could, but she did not dare to kiss him ­until she had asked and he consented.49 And when Mechthilt of Trüllikon at Katharinental was at mass, praying and weeping, Christ came to her as a child, consoling her as though she w ­ ere the child by placing an apple in 43. ​SB Adelhausen, 177, 170–71. 44. ​The remainder of this section for the most part appeared ­earlier in my article “Ihesus ist unser!: The Christ Child in the German S­ ister Books,” in The Christ Child in Medieval Culture: Alpha es et O!, ed. Mary Dzon and Theresa M. Kenney (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012), 167–98. 45. ​SB Unterlinden, 409–10. 46. ​SB Töss 21, 45; SB Katharinental, 106. On the identification of the antiphon, see Meyer’s commentary in SB Katharinental, 212; “Ave maris stella” is prob­ably meant. 47. ​Strauch, Die Offenbarungen der Adelheid Langmann, 60, refers to a gallery. See Carola Jäggi, Frauenklöster im Spätmittelalter: Die Kirchen der Klarissen und Dominikanerinnen im 13. und 14. Jahrhundert (Petersberg: Michael Imhof, 2006), 193. On the choir at Engelthal in par­tic­u­lar, see Hindsley, The Mystics of Engelthal, 7–8; and Carola Jäggi, “Architecture et disposition liturgique des couvents féminins dans le Rhin supérieur aux XIIIe et XIVe siècles,” in Les Dominicaines d’Unterlinden, ed. Madeleine Blondel, Jeffrey F. Hamburger, and Catherine Leroy (Paris: Somogy; Colmar: Musée d’Unterlinden, 2000–2001), 89–107. 48. ​See Jeffrey F. Hamburger, The Visual and the Visionary: Art and Female Spirituality in Late Medieval Germany (New York: Zone, 1998), 71–89. For reformers’ attitudes, see Jeffrey F. Hamburger, Nuns as Artists: The Visual Culture of a Medieval Convent (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 51. 49. ​SB Töss, 88.



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her hand.50 Christ himself might hold an apple as a reminder of the sin in Eden that occasioned his incarnation, but in this case the apple had become benign.

Liturgical Presence as Exhibition In vari­ous contexts exhibition is central to ritual. When the Eleusinian mysteries w ­ ere performed in ancient Greece, the ritual began in darkness, then a chamber door opened, brilliant light shone forth, and sacred ritual objects w ­ ere displayed to the initiates along with some kind of reenactment of the myth of Demeter and Persephone, which impressed upon them their own capacity for life beyond death.51 Medieval liturgy had something of the same character, ­whether the exhibition was at e­ very mass (the elevation of the host) or linked to a par­tic­u­lar occasion (the kindling of light at the Easter vigil).52 Exhibition of relics was also a ritual event; on a saint’s feast day or some other occasion, relics could be displayed solemnly, perhaps from the elevated position of a gallery. Benediction and exhibition of the consecrated host ­were traditions popu­lar in the late medieval West.53 Pro­cessions also typically entailed moving exhibition of the sacrament, a statue, or some other sacred object. ­Because exhibition is not simply a seeing but a showing, it implies agency and intention. In princi­ple it can raise a number of questions—­why the object is shown, why by certain persons and to certain persons, why at a par­tic­ u­lar time and place and ­under par­tic­u­lar circumstances—­that need not arise with a mere seeing. And it anticipates a response, ritual or emotional or both. The consecrated host elevated at mass is not just seen but shown for devout adoration. The relics of a saint are shown for veneration. Late medieval narratives of Christophany, stories about ­people who encounter Christ, are often presented in a way that accentuates their character as showings, and b­ ecause the person shown has eternal presence but at this moment enters into time, they are revelations of that person that also reveal the relationship between time and eternity, frequently within a liturgical context. What­ever other response is expected, what­ever sense of devotion or compassion, the under­lying purpose is manifestation of this breakthrough from eternity into time. 50. ​SB Katharinental. 134. 51. ​George E. Mylonas, Eleusis and the Eleusinian Mysteries (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1961), 84. 52. ​Marion J. Hatchett, Commentary on the American Prayer Book (New York: Harper, 1995), 239–50. 53. ​Peter Browe, Die Eucharistie im Mittelalter: Liturgiehistorische Forschungen in kulturwissenschaftlicher Absicht, ed. Hubertus Lutterbach and Thomas Flammer (Hamburg: Lit, 2003), 395–97, 399–413.

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When Christ’s presence was manifest in a liturgical setting, he was often shown at one or another stage in his Passion, particularly during Holy Week and most especially on Good Friday. Among the horrors of crucifixion was its public character. It was meant to raise up for extended public display and shaming of the person being executed. Any repre­sen­ta­tion of Christ’s crucifixion is thus an image of a cruelly sustained showing. Christ bound to a pillar and scourged, the prelude to his exhibition by Pilate, is itself taken as exhibition and figures prominently in several visions. Margery Kempe saw him thus bound and scourged, with eight sharp prongs of lead affixed to each of sixteen scourges.54 It is a recurrent theme in the sister-­books, where, for example, Christ appears to a nun as he looked when he was taken from the pillar, with fresh wounds, pitiable appearance, and blood flowing over his entire body, and he asked her how long she would continue to live her undisciplined life.55 The late medieval theme of Christ as the Man of Sorrows, who bears all the wounds of the Passion but stands or sits in a position that allows him to call attention to t­ hose wounds, represents an ambiguous moment in which Christ bears all the marks of death but is not dead and displays his own wounds to the viewer. In this case the event depicted is not just a showing but a revelatory and deliberately confrontational self-­showing, as made clear by the biblical text associated with this iconographic theme, Lamentations 1:12, “O all you who pass by the way, behold and see if ­there is any sorrow like my sorrow.” The Man of Sorrows is engaged in self-­display even when he is held aloft by angels for viewers to behold.56 The suffering Christ may seem most obviously a spectacle shown and seen, particularly in a liturgical context, but the infant Christ could also be experienced in that mode. In the sister-­books as elsewhere, the child Christ is sometimes seen at the elevation, when the priest holds up the consecrated host and it changes into a baby, in some accounts “the most beautiful child ever seen.” Angela of Foligno and Birgitta of Sweden ­were among many who saw Christ in the form of a child at the elevation of the consecrated host.57 The motif, 54. ​BMK 1.80 (Windeatt, 231–35). 55. ​SB Adelhausen, 170; cf. SB Katharinental, 98; SB Unterlinden, 396–97. 56. ​Gertrude Schiller, Iconography of Christian Art, trans. Janet Seligman, vol. 2 (London: Lund Humphries, 1972), 197–24 (Man of Sorrows accompanied by angels, 215–19). See also figure 1 in this book. 57. ​AF Memorial, c. 3 (Lachance, 147); Birgitta of Sweden, Life and Selected Revelations, ed. Marguerite Tjader Harris, trans. Albert Ryle Kezel (New York and Mahwah, NJ: Paulist, 1990), c. 30, p. 79. See André Vauchez, The Laity in the M ­ iddle Ages: Religious Beliefs and Devotional Practices, ed. Daniel E. Bornstein, trans. Margery J. Schneider (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993), 240. During the Christmas mass Ida of Nivelles saw Christ as a baby in the priest’s hands at the elevation, then she saw the priest divide him into three parts, but at the second mass he was again in the priest’s hands; see Martinus Cowley, trans., Send Me God: The Lives of Ida the Compassionate of Nivelles, Nun of



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which occurs already in the early thirteenth-­century Dialogus miraculorum (Dialogue of Miracles) by Caesarius of Heisterbach, is analogous to the Mass of Saint Gregory: both t­ hese motifs represent Christ pre­sent liturgically, and both occur frequently in l­ater medieval devotion. The Mass of Saint Gregory has the obvious advantage of being appropriate to the mass conceived precisely as sacrifice, and specifically as an unbloody making-­present of Christ’s sacrifice on Calvary. But the child-­in-­the-­host miracle is fitting both for the obvious practical reason that if Christ is to be elevated at the consecration, he must be in a small enough form to be held aloft, and perhaps more importantly for the theological reason that Christ’s becoming sacramentally pre­sent in the Eucharist serves as a liturgical analogue to his becoming historically pre­sent in the incarnation. The visionary experience of Dorothea of Montau involved a yet wider range of liturgically correlated exhibitions. For the feast of the Invention of the Holy Cross, images of the crucifix ­were brought to Dorothea’s presence, and she recognized the vari­ous types, knowing all their distinctive features and their arrangement, w ­ hether they ­were hung high or low or in stalls, which suggests she was thinking of par­tic­u­lar crucifixes she knew from churches or elsewhere. ­These images of the cross appeared around her and seemed to press upon her, as if each of them strove to approach her more than o ­ thers.58 When relics w ­ ere exhibited at nearby Marienburg, with indulgences attached to the occasion, Dorothea in her cell did not participate bodily in the occasion, but Christ showed her the relevant shrines and relics and bestowed the indulgences pertaining to the exhibition.59 Similarly, for the feast of the Crown of Thorns, Christ, his ­mother, and many saints appeared to her exhibiting the crown, three nails, the cross, and the lance (described with the appropriate dimensions), Dorothea wept over them for hours. Christ said they ­were brought into her presence ­because she could not visit the locations where they w ­ ere kept, and they ­were shown to her as he bore them bodily in his Passion. What­ever reverence she paid them was done to him. He would bear them at the Last Judgment, the ultimate exhibition, in which Christ appears as judge but displays his wounds, and, in late medieval iconography, angels display the instruments of the Passion.60 La Ramée, Arnulf, Lay ­Brother of Villers, and Abundus, Monk of Villers, by Goswin of Bossut (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003), c. 21a–­c, p. 63. 58. ​LdF c. 61, pp. 100–101. 59. ​LdF c. 61, p. 101. 60. ​LdF c. 62, pp. 102–3; Richard Kieckhefer, “Meditating on Passion, Meditating on Judgment: The First and Second Comings of Christ in Medieval Imagination,” in Last ­Things: Apocalypse, Judgment and Millennium in the M ­ iddle Ages, ed. Susan J. Ridyard, Sewanee Medieval Studies, 12 (Sewanee,

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Presence Mediated by the Liturgical Year Cele­bration of the liturgical year with its feasts and fasts was one of the most impor­tant bonds among medieval Christians. Every­one knew it was Lent, and its observance was widespread. Christmas, Palm Sunday, Easter, and eventually Corpus Christi w ­ ere public occasions, and feast days could be used for dating of documents. Christophany linked to the liturgical calendar was thus an exceptional experience grounded in the shared rituals of ordinary religion. One might expect t­ hose deeply immersed in the liturgy to enter into the events of Christ’s life celebrated in the temporal cycle of the church year, to take t­ hose events as subject m ­ atter for meditation, which could shade into visionary experience. Already in the twelfth ­century the liturgical year had been the framework for revelation in the life and work of Elizabeth of Schönau.61 Two of the fullest manifestations of t­ hese tendencies are Part 1 of The Book of Special Grace associated with Mechthild of Hackeborn and, all the more, Book 4 of the Herald ascribed to Gertrude of Helfta. In most cases, however, the texts show less interest in the gospel events than one might expect. The events celebrated according to the liturgical calendar become pegs on which other ­matters are hung, and just when we might expect to find retrojection to the time of the biblical narrative, what we find more often is projection of Christ into the pre­sent. It is the manifestation in the pre­sent that is, a­ fter all, taken to be literal; the historical event may not be literally transferred to the pre­sent, but the Christ who pre­sents himself in forms or situations linked to the event is assumed to be real and in princi­ple accessible to anyone. Part 1 of The Book of Special Grace follows the course of the liturgical year from Advent onward (a pattern that had been established by Elizabeth of Schönau, although she began on Pentecost). In that text Mechthild of Hackeborn experienced revelations keyed in vari­ous ways to the liturgical occasion, but not adhering strictly to the gospel narrative. She might see not only the gospel events celebrated in the liturgy but also God the ­Father on an ivory throne, the Trinity in the form of a celestial fountain, a tree growing up from the altar, and another tree growing inside the church, with beasts and p­ eople eating its fruit, and black birds flying about it. On the night of the Nativity she had a vision in which she was on a rocky mountain where the Virgin gave birth, a divine light burst forth, and suddenly the child appeared in the m ­ other’s lap.62 She found the infant lying in a manger, the infant spoke to her at length, TN: University of the South Press, 2002), 67–84. Charles Wesley’s hymn “Lo He Comes” captures the sense with his lines: “With what rapture . . . ​gaze we on ­those glorious scars!” 61. ​Elisabeth of Schönau, The Complete Works, trans. Anne L. Clark (New York: Paulist, 2000). 62. ​LSG 1.5 (Newman, 43).



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and soon she realized how “all the fullness of divinity . . . ​dwelt in such a tiny ­little baby,” whose wisdom equaled that of the eternal Word.63 On the feast of Saint John the Evangelist she fleetingly saw the saint resting on the breast of Christ, as at the Last Supper, but then a multitude of saints was dancing and praising John, and she asked how she too might praise him, so Christ suggested twelve ways she might do so.64 On Palm Sunday she recalled “all that Christ did on earth that day,” but immediately her attention turned to the hospitality he received in the h ­ ouse of Mary and Martha, and to the seven foods (including his own heart) and three drinks given him t­ here.65 Even on Good Friday, when one might expect more reference to gospel events, her attention wove back and forth between sacred narrative and pre­sent experience, and her own situation was integrated into the account. During the office of prime, when the trial of Christ was commemorated, Mechthild heard herself accused of numerous failings by the ­orders of angels and categories of saints, but then redeemed by Christ. At terce she saw him scourged and crowned with thorns, a wondrous “garland” woven from the headaches she had been suffering. At compline the Virgin urged her to take him and bury him in her heart, which she saw in the form of a silver sarcophagus with a gold lid.66 At the paschal vigil she saw Christ lying in his tomb, “as it w ­ ere,” but then, rather than seeing him rise, she had a dialogue with him regarding the glorification rendered to him on vari­ous occasions.67 Gertrude of Helfta also is said to have experienced the gospel events, but in her case the account is even less tied to the biblical narrative. A vision of the Annunciation only alludes to Christ’s incarnation.68 On the feast of the Circumcision, which celebrated also the name of Jesus, Gertrude had a vision of the devotional invocations ­people made of that name—­“Hail, Jesus most loving, most kind, most desiring”—­represented as floating roses with bells attached to them.69 On the Epiphany she spiritualized the gifts of the Magi, offering the body of Christ in place of myrrh, the soul of Christ instead of frankincense, the divinity of Christ in place of gold, all as amends for the sins of the world, and Christ himself appeared and delivered her offering to the Trinity.70 During mass on the feast of Christ’s Nativity, Gertrude “perceived in spirit” that members of the community ­were bringing forward the prayers 63. ​LSG 1.5, pp. 45–46 (Newman, 43–47). 64. ​LSG 1.6 (Newman, 49). 65. ​LSG 1.14, pp. 65–66 (Newman, 65–66). 66. ​LSG 1.18, pp. 72–75 (Newman, 69–76). 67. ​LSG 1.19 (Newman, 76). 68. ​LDP 4.12.1 (Barratt, 69). 69. ​LDP 4.5 (Barratt, 39). 70. ​LDP 4.6 (Barratt, 43).

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they had said during Advent and presenting them as offerings. She realized that the ­women who ­were successfully offering their prayers to Christ had been “devoutly concentrating on the Lord as born spiritually in their inmost hearts,” while the o ­ thers “­were only thinking about the Lord’s being born at that time in Bethlehem, as the church pre­sents it.”71 While acknowledging that the liturgical year commemorates historical events, the text ­here clearly privileges pre­sent experience. Even ­those who had focused on the inward birth of Christ ­were presenting their offerings in a communal setting, and turning inward together is emphasized more than turning back together into the historical past. On Maundy Thursday, Christ showed her himself as he was when about to die: as the Eternal Wisdom of the ­Father he foresaw every­thing about to befall him as if it had already occurred, but as a tender mortal he quaked, trembled, and showed terrible gestures and changes of color as if experiencing the bitterness of death.72 Even a historical event is shown h ­ ere from the vantage point not of time but of eternity. On Good Friday, Gertrude noted how around the hour of prime Christ condescended to be judged by Pontius Pilate (called a Saracen), and immediately she saw a vision of him not standing in judgment but seated on a heavenly throne with God the ­Father.73 Particularly prominent in the sister-­books are apparitions of the child Christ at the feast of the Nativity, which is par excellence the feast of manifestation.74 Bernard of Clairvaux and Gertrude of Helfta had e­ arlier enjoyed a vision of the child during the night of the Nativity.75 It was at Christmas that Mezzi Sidwibrin saw a child sitting in the chapel, inspiring her to cry out, “Jesus is ours!”76 Such visions occurred often at Unterlinden and Adelhausen. Adelheid of Epfig at Unterlinden asked God to reveal the precise time of Christ’s birth, so on the eve of the Nativity an angel suddenly awakened her, knocking loudly on her bed, and then she heard a voice telling her to rise quickly, for this was the hour of the Nativity.77 During matins and mass, Agnes Waller suddenly saw Jesus as a glowing white infant surrounded by a kind of red ­aura.78 Gertrude of Rheinfelden spent the eve of the Nativity in prayer, but when the responsory for Mass began, she suddenly beheld a beautifully orna71. ​LDP 4.3.8 (Barratt, 25–26). 72. ​LDP 4.25.5 Barratt, 134). 73. ​LDP 4.26.4–6 (Barratt, 139–40). 74. ​A version of this paragraph appeared ­earlier in my article “Ihesus ist unser!” 75. ​LDP 2.6 Barratt, 16–18); Geoffrey Webb and Adrian Walker, trans., St. Bernard of Clairvaux: The Story of His Life as Recorded in the Vita Prima Bernardi by Certain of his Contemporaries (London: Mowbray, 1960), 17. 76. ​SB Töss, 28–29. 77. ​SB Unterlinden, 411. 78. ​SB Unterlinden, 413.



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mented bed placed in the center of the choir, on which Christ’s ­mother lay, with brightness flowing from her face and her clothing and illuminating the choir, and on her lap she fondled her newborn child.79 As at Helfta, the historical event is observed and its narrative is noted, but the emphasis lies resolutely on con­temporary manifestation of Christ as the newborn child. Even if the gospel events ­were not fully laid out, Christ was often manifested in a form appropriate to the liturgical occasion. Out of devotion to Christ’s childhood one nun felt ­great sweetness from Christmas onward, which was replaced by bitterness at Candlemas (presumably ­because of Simeon’s prophecy of the Passion in Luke 2:35); another found the child Christ hiding ­under her mantle all through Christmas matins; yet another went to open the lectionary for the first lesson of Christmas and saw the child lying in swaddling clothes on the open book. One Christmas, a ­sister of Katharinental had ­g reat desire to see Christ as a child. While she was in her devotions, she saw a small child go up on the altar. Then another nun went up to the altar as sacristan, and the child went to her, and wherever her office took her, the Jesusli went along with her, all through the mass. A ­ fter Christmas matins, a s­ ister of Engelthal saw the child Christ lying before the altar on stiff hay, which pricked his tender body so that it had red furrows. But once when she was at prayer, she saw him again in his childhood, with pretty garments, playing before her in a lovable way. Her heart welled up with love, and she thought that if she could hold him she would lavish love upon him, but he answered her thoughts, telling her he does not let himself be enjoyed in that way. Then he opened her inner senses and gave her to understand that he was making reference to the holiness of the sacraments, presumably meaning he is most truly possessed not in visionary experience but in the Eucharist.80 He often came at a specific age. At Christmas, Adelheid Langmann and her fellow nuns saw and honored him at the first mass as an infant in his ­mother’s arms, then at the second mass he came as a boy of eight years and no one noticed him, while at the third mass he came as a striking adult figure and again drew notice—­thus replicating the pattern of recognition and concealment established during his life on earth.81 When he appeared to Mechthild of Hackeborn as a five-­year-­old boy, she asked why he appeared at that age, and he said she had now lived fifty years, and he in this manifestation had lived five, but each of his years stood for ten of hers, and her years ­were sanctified and all her life perfected by his life. The one specific age of Jesus mentioned in the 79. ​SB Unterlinden, 431–32. 80. ​SB Adelhausen, 169 and 171; SB Katharinental, 125-26 and 136; SB Engelthal, 36. 81. ​Strauch, Die Offenbarungen der Adelheid Langmann, 33–35. Christ appears to Christina of Hane as an infant but then a young man, indicating that he would grow in her heart: VCH c. 6, p. 7.

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gospels (Luke 2:42), when his parents found him in the ­Temple, is twelve, and if t­ here is one par­tic­u­lar age more than ­others that he tended to adopt for apparition it was that. Mechthild of Hackeborn had a vision of him as a boy of twelve years enthroned on the altar, and in the sister-­books too he appeared sometimes at that age.82 Dorothea of Montau wished to see Christ at age twelve, and she did, but he appeared to her in vari­ous forms, sometimes in quick succession. He might begin by showing his pre-­incarnate omnipotence and then proceed to the stages of his incarnate life. He might make the display in reverse order: first in form of a man when sat on an ass on Palm Sunday, then as a twelve-­year-­ old boy, then at seven years, then at three years, then as infant not yet three weeks old, and fi­nally as omnipotent deity. ­These images might be simultaneous rather than successive: at least once she saw multiple images of him all around her in vari­ous ages, from infancy to the full stature of manhood, and ­there ­were so many images, larger and smaller and in between, that although she sat in the midst of them she could not count them, but gazed on them delightedly with her inner eye, not her outer vision.83 It is as though Christ was playing games with her, even tricks of magical deception, but actually the effect was to underscore that Christ dwells in eternity and manifests himself in forms of his own choosing, entering into Dorothea’s pre­sent in as many historical forms as he wishes to adopt. That he was not bound to historical pre­ce­dent is clear also from a revelation to Adelheid Langmann in which the four-­year-­old Christ displayed the wounds in his hands, feet, and side.84 Reciprocity of suffering, a key theme in late medieval devotion, is found in more than one of the sister-­books, particularly during Holy Week.85 Presented as a spectacle for the ­sisters’ viewing, Christ calls to mind that he has suffered for their sake and requires that they reciprocate. The ways they do so may seem trivial, even banal; the point is the sacralization of ordinary experience through assimilation to Christ’s paradigmatic suffering. One of the ­sisters at Engelthal was in rapture from Wednesday in Holy Week ­until the Easter Vigil and saw all that happened to Christ in his Passion—­a somewhat exceptional case in which the narrative is privileged over distinct moments. When another of the same convent was appointed to the office of cellarer, to her dismay, Christ appeared 82. ​LSG 2.9, pp. 143–44 (Newman, 125); LSG 1.9 (Newman, 53); SB Engelthal, 43. 83. ​LdF c. 28, pp. 52–53; LdF c. 28, p. 54; cf. c. 25, p. 48; LdF c. 29, p. 55. The Virgin also manifests herself in vari­ous modes: as queen of heaven and earth and as a w ­ oman in childbirth, or as she came for the pre­sen­ta­tion in the ­Temple, when she conceived her Son, when she was close to childbirth, when she took Christ to ­Temple, and a glorious and mighty queen in heaven (LdF c. 30, p. 56). 84. ​Strauch, Die Offenbarungen der Adelheid Langmann, 19. 85. ​Richard Kieckhefer, Unquiet Souls: Fourteenth-­Century Saints and Their Religious Milieu (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 89–121.



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to her in his Passion and with his five wounds, saying he had suffered this for her sake, and asking, “What do you suffer for my sake?”86 The theme of compassion for the suffering of Christ is especially pronounced in the sister-­book of Adelhausen. One nun of that convent prayed that Christ might take her suffering away from her, but he came to her in a ­g reat light, pointed to the fresh wounds he suffered for her sake, and said she must bear her suffering patiently, for he was with her and would remain with her in all her l­abors, never leaving her. Another wished to know what it was like for Christ when he was nailed to the cross, and on one occasion her desire was so ­g reat that God fulfilled it, giving her such pain in her hands and feet that it was if they ­were being pierced by nails.87 Receiving the stigmata was the quin­tes­sen­tial but not the only mode of sharing in Christ’s suffering. Stefana Quinzani (1457–1530) conversed with Christ but then was herself “fettered with her hands above her head with insoluble, invisible bonds as w ­ ere her feet,” like Christ at the pillar; then she was “invisibly flagellated.” When Christ appeared and spoke to her, she professed herself unworthy to bear his Passion, but when he offered her his crown of thorns, she accepted it.88 Devotion to the Passion and death of Christ tended in late medieval piety to overshadow consciousness of the resurrection. Easter would of course be celebrated liturgically in any parish or monastery, but in devotional practice and in works of art the Passion of Christ loomed considerably larger.89 Still, the post-­resurrection apparitions of Christ ­were archetypal examples of Christophany, and echoes of ­these apparitions are not entirely absent from the late medieval rec­ord. An illumination in the manuscript of Nicholas Finet’s dialogue for Margaret of York shows Christ appearing to her with the banner of his resurrection, somewhat as he appeared by the empty tomb to Mary Magdalene.90 The Engelthal sister-­book says that when Anne Vorhtlin was only 86. ​SB Engelthal, 11–12, 28. 87. ​SB Adelhausen, 183, 185; see also SB Engelthal, 42–43. Another ­sister was much devoted to the Passion and felt it so deeply that she experienced the stigmata on her hands and feet. Once she was in the choir and Christ appeared to her on the cross, and the sight was so pitiable that neither Isaiah nor any other saintly writer had quite captured it as she saw it. With this vision he taught her to be patient in her own suffering (SB Adelhausen, 168). The infirmarian at Adelhausen urged an unnamed ­sister who was ill to eat a pear, but she heard a voice within her saying, “­Will you seek plea­sure in a pear? You should seek plea­sure in my Passion.” So she told the infirmarian that God did not want her to take the dish (SB Adelhausen, 166). 88. ​Gabriella Zarri, “Places and Gestures of ­Women’s Preaching in Quattro-­and Cinquecento Italy,” trans. Donald Bathgate, in Charisma and Religious Authority: Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Preaching, 1200–1500, ed. Katherine L. Jansen and Miri Rubin (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010), 189–90. 89. ​Kieckhefer, Unquiet Souls, 96–97. 90. ​Christina Normore, A Feast for the Eyes: Art, Per­for­mance, and the Late Medieval Banquet (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 190–93; Thomas Kren, “Revolution and Transformation: Painting in Devotional Manuscripts, circa 1467–1485,” in Illuminating the Re­nais­sance: The Triumph of Flemish

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fourteen. Christ appeared to her on Easter in his resurrected state. One day she was in her devotions in choir, and he appeared to her as resurrected; on the third day ­after this, three lords appeared to her with a heavenly robe enveloping them, so that a single person emerged from the three, thus demonstrating the Trinity. Again one Easter she saw him in the clouds, banner in hand, with Mary Magdalene kneeling before him.91 The liturgical calendar is thus not neglected in t­ hese texts, but in large mea­ sure retrojection is put into the ser­vice of projection: commemoration of the biblical events becomes an opportunity for manifestation in the pre­sent of Christ as he appeared at the time of t­ hose events. Memory of Christ in history might be delightful, “dans vera cordis gaudia,” and consciousness of his presence might be far more so, “super mel et omnia,”92 but frequently the ideal was a merger of the two, with Christ pre­sent in a way that itself evoked historical memory.

Veronica of Binasco and Entry into Biblical Narrative Veronica Negroni of Binasco (1445–1497) comes l­ater than most of the figures covered in this study, but she is worth noting as an exception to much of what has been said in this chapter. For her, retrojection into biblical time and experience of the biblical narrative ­were fundamentally impor­tant and seem to have been viewed as literal, and for her, the liturgical year was very much the occasion for that collapsing of time, at least as her experience is portrayed in her vita.93 Her hagiographer’s concern was to establish her sanctity by

Manuscript Painting in Eu­rope, ed. Thomas Kren and Scot McKendrick (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2003), 215–16. 91. ​Again before her death he appeared to her as resurrected (SB Engelthal, 35–37), an ir inricheit; see also the account of a lay ­sister, SB Engelthal, 39–40. 92. ​The hymn usually called “Jesu dulcis memoria” begins (in its most familiar form) with the lines Jesu dulcis memoria, dans vera cordis gaudia, sed super mel et omnia eius dulcis presencia. The memory of the historical Jesus of the gospels is sweet, giving heartfelt joy, but his presence, like the spirit of Wisdom, is sweeter than honey (Ecclesiasticus 24:27, “super mel dulcis”). 93. ​Renato Vasconi, I giorni di Veronica: storia della beata Veronica Negroni da Binasco agostiniana, 2nd ed. (Milan: Gribaudi, 2000); Alessasndra Bartolomei Romagnoli, Emore Paoli, and Pierantonio Piatti, Angeliche visioni: Veronica da Binasco nella Milano del Rinascimento (Florence: Galluzzo, 2016).



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showing her privileged to enter fully into biblical narrative in a way that is decidedly more exceptional than ordinary. A member of an Augustinian convent in Milan, she had a long series of visions that fellow nuns recorded in the vernacular in three volumes. ­These served as the basis for a vita written in 1517 by a Dominican friar, in which Book 4 recounts a series of visions detailing the life of Christ. Her experiences typically occurred at times of private prayer but might also be during the mass and particularly ­after communion, or just a­ fter mass, or during or just before or a­ fter the liturgical hours.94 In her visions she is led about from scene to scene by an angel guardian. Christ himself holds lengthy discourse with her.95 Once he tells her certain t­hings specifically for her to repeat to the s­ isters in her convent. In two instances, although she hears a ­great deal, she is unable to remember it when she regains her corporeal senses.96 She does not typically experience double consciousness, or simultaneous awareness of both her pre­sent context and the historical time she witnesses, but her ordinary life is given as a framework for her revelations in ecstasy: she may enter ecstasy, regain use of her senses long enough to see the priest celebrating mass, then reenter ecstasy.97 The other nuns in the convent w ­ ere clearly accustomed to Veronica’s visionary experiences and seem to have waited eagerly for her to return from rapture and report to them on what she had seen. On one occasion they asked specifically about Christ’s appearance and clothing.98 Another time she returned to find herself sitting in the refectory and would rather not have told of her vision, but her superior ordered her to “reveal the secrets which she had been accustomed to keep happily to herself.”99 One Easter was the first time she entered rapture in the full sight of the other nuns; previously she had left her bodily senses secretly and only at night. Realizing this time that the s­isters had observed her rapture, Veronica was so deeply embarrassed that she blushed and her ­whole body trembled.100 ­After one of her raptures she returned to her bodily senses, burning in mind and body with a divine fire. Another nun rushed to embrace her and felt that all of her body was warm.101 On another occasion Veronica returned to find that the other nuns had finished eating, giving the quotidian framework from which the visionary had sprung loose. When she 94. ​VVB 2.4; 2.7, 22.42; 3.8, 4.9, 4.10, 8.20, 2.6; 2.7, 4.11, 5.12, 10.22, 20.39; 7.16, 16.31, 13.28, 21.41, 22.5. References are to chapters and paragraphs in Book IV. 95. ​VVB 10.22. 96. ​VVB 13.28; 7.19, 8.20. 97. ​VVB 4.11. 98. ​VVB 7.19. 99. ​VVB 9.21. 100. ​VVB 20.39–40. 101. ​VVB 22.42.

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regained her senses, her awakening was usually abrupt. She remained punctilious in her monastic responsibilities: on returning to her bodily senses, she found herself summoned by her superior to accompany another nun through the city of Milan begging alms.102 At many points the vita tells of visions that sound as if they could be inspired by devotional meditations. At the arrest of Christ, the Jews and their impious multitude seem like famished wolves rushing upon a lamb. They place an iron chain around his neck and draw him on, while every­one insults Jesus. They strike him with the h ­ andles of swords, they drag him along, and they torment him with rocks.103 During his trial, the man who strikes him in the face has a hand covered with an iron glove, and the purple robe they put on him is torn and ragged.104 The cross is “a massive object,” which is laid on the ground beside Christ, who lies down on it. The holes in the cross are too far apart, so his arms and hands are pulled with a cord u ­ ntil the bones are wrenched out of joint. When they drive in the nails they bang with their hammers as if they ­were attaching pieces of wood. They raise the cross but then let it fall, then sway back and forth.105 Repeatedly Mary shows compassion for her Son. At his birth and death she covers his nakedness with the veil from her own head.106 At the Annunciation, Gabriel expounds to her all the sorrowful and joyful mysteries, indeed her Son’s entire life and conduct, before his conception—­although “with God’s consent the evangelists ­were ­silent about this.”107 Just before the Last Supper, Christ and his ­mother meet at Martha’s ­house in Bethany for one last intimate conversation about the coming Passion.108 Joined eventually by Mary Magdalene, she pleads with him insistently not to go to Jerusalem. He cites prophecies, argues his obedience to the F ­ ather, and consoles her g­ ently.109 During the Passion she wails, laments, and more than once falls lifeless to the ground. Fi­nally, on Easter morning, Mary’s face suddenly changes from sorrow to joy, which gradually increases ­until fi­nally she breaks out in glad laughter. Mary’s prescience becomes clear when Christ appears, shining with heavenly splendor. He and Mary greet each other, and she embraces him.110 102. ​VVB 2.3. 103. ​VVB 15.30. 104. ​VVB 16.31. 105. ​VVB 17.33. Some of the detail is echoed in John of Caulibus, Meditations on the Life of Christ, trans. Francis X. Taney, Anne Miller, and C. Mary Stallings-­Taney (Asheville, NC: Pegasus, 2000), c. 78, pp. 253. 106. ​VVB 17.33. 107. ​VVB 1.1. 108. ​John of Caulibus, Meditations on the Life of Christ, c. 72, pp. 226–27. 109. ​VVB 14.29. 110. ​VVB 20.39; cf. John of Caulibus, Meditations on the Life of Christ, c. 82, pp. 280–81.



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­There are details that might come from devotional lit­er­a­ture but also from art or drama: the four angels who safeguard Christ’s modesty at his baptism by holding up a garment; the Devil who tempts Christ in the form of a hermit and then takes on more horrible appearance and breathes fire all about; Christ’s pilgrim garb on the road to Emmaus.111 From any of vari­ous sources Veronica might have gleaned the notion of Christ as puer senex, with a mature and serious visage even in infancy.112 The infancy narrative gives material taken indirectly from early apocryphal texts: the unbelieving midwife at Christ’s miraculous birth;113 the signs of joy from all creation, even the stars; the fountain of oil flowing at Rome; a ­temple demolished by heavenly action; the tamed animals and the palm branch that bowed down during the flight into Egypt.114 While Veronica never quite says that the Holy ­Family was of noble lineage or even high station, she portrays them and their circle as social dignitaries, splendidly (if not stylishly) attired and surrounded by an entourage of servants, while their asses are laden with ­house­hold utensils.115 ­Here and t­here the account is glaringly anachronistic. The wedding banquet at Cana is described like a g­ rand Re­nais­sance feast.116 The worship of the Magi is a contest in courtesy of the sort that Johan Huizinga mocked as a peculiar feature of late medieval courtly life, and Christ competes even with his ­mother in a contest of courtesy.117 The com­pany at dinner chant grace like good late medieval religious, and Mary Magdalene tells Christ all her sins “with all the surrounding circumstances rendering the offenses more serious or placing them in distinct categories.”118 When Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus come to remove Christ’s body from the cross, they are draped in the black gowns of mourning, with hoods covering their eyes.119 C.S. Lewis observed that such anachronism was commonplace ­until the time of the

111. ​VVB 8.20; 10.22; 20.39. 112. ​VVB 5.12. 113. ​“Infancy Gospel of James,” cc. 19–21, in Ronald F. Hock, ed., The Infancy Gospels of James and Thomas, with Introduction, Notes, and Original Text Featuring the New Scholars Version Translation (Santa Rosa, CA: Polebridge, 1995), 66–69; Michael Rosenberg, Signs of Virginity: Testing Virgins and Making Men in Late Antiquity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 90–99 and 107–12. 114. ​VVB 2.6; 6.14. 115. ​VVB 6.13. 116. ​VVB 9.21. 117. ​VVB 4.11, 14.29. J. Huizinga, The Waning of the M ­ iddle Ages: A Study of the Forms of Life, Thought and Art in France and the Netherlands in the XIVth and XVth Centuries, trans. F. Hopman (London: Edward Arnold, 1924), 33–38. One is perhaps reminded also of Frederick Burr Opper’s comic characters Alphonse and Gaston, whose habitual deference to each other was famously captured in the exchange, “You first, my dear Gaston! A ­ fter you, my dear Alphonse!” 118. ​VVB 9.21, 12.25. 119. ​VVB 17.i.36.

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Waverly novels, and it typified medieval repre­sen­ta­tion of classical gods and goddesses as well.120 ­There are hints at recognition that if Veronica goes back in time she may have difficulty with language. In general she understands what the gospels have prepared her to understand or to imagine,121 ­whether this means that she is understanding Aramaic or that the inhabitants of first-­century Palestine are conversing in Italian. But when the Magi talk among themselves a­ fter adoring the infant, she hears them but says she understands nothing,122 perhaps ­because they speak a language or languages she does not know. This detail can be called realistic only if the cycle of visions is viewed as a­ ctual retrojection into the biblical past. Like other w ­ omen who go back to the time of the gospels, she becomes a participant specifically in events that involve Mary. The moments when she has a sense of participation are furthermore invariably times of movement, even of travel: during the flight into Egypt she seems to be a member of the com­pany, walking alongside the Virgin’s donkey and hearing all that is said; she accompanies Mary and her f­ amily as they seek Jesus in Jerusalem, yet she is si­mul­ta­neously able to see the movements of Joseph with his alternative search party. When Christ carries his cross through the streets of the city, Veronica follows ­behind, as she does again at his burial.123 She is the privileged recipient of mystical ­favors that she cannot or dares not share. Indeed, the ineffability of her experience is sometimes safeguarded by a kind of mystical amnesia, particularly regarding conversation. At other times she cannot relate the contents of her visions, not ­because she does not recall them but b­ ecause they deserve to remain shrouded in reverent silence. This theme is first sounded a­ fter the Nativity: “Veronica affirmed that she then had discerned divine secrets which cannot be related to mortals, or be expressed in ­human words, indeed the mind could not grasp them if it approached such ­things in ­human words.” Again at the Purification, “she beheld many t­ hings beyond h ­ uman comprehension, about which at the command of the immortal God she remained s­ ilent,” while on the flight into Egypt the Virgin Mary “revealed divine mysteries” to Veronica “but ordered her to tell 120. ​C.S. Lewis, The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Re­nais­sance Lit­er­a­ture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964), 182–84; Jean Seznec, The Survival of the Pagan Gods: The Mythological Tradition and Its Place in Re­nais­sance Humanism and Art, trans. Barbara F. Sessions (New York: Pantheon, 1953). 121. ​VVB 4.10–11, 7.19, 8.20, 12.25, 14.29, 15.30, 20.39, 17.34. 122. ​VVB 4.11. 123. ​VVB 6.14–15; 7.16; 16.32; 17.1.36.



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them to no one,” with but a few exceptions. A ­ fter telling what he can, Veronica’s biographer abruptly cuts off the revelation, saying, “I think I must remain s­ ilent h ­ ere about the many ­things that the blessed Virgin taught Veronica, though I would willingly commit them to writing if God approved.”124 Yet this reticence does not occur in visions dealing specifically with Christ; it is ­limited to ­those in which the Virgin plays a dominant role, perhaps ­because it was more seemly for Veronica to share casual conversation with another ­woman, and their discourse turned now and then to privileged topics. The link between earthly and heavenly liturgy was a par­tic­u­lar a theme in Veronica’s vita. For certain feasts she was led into the heavenly regions, where the same feasts w ­ ere being celebrated grandly.125 Just before the Nativity, for example, she beheld the citizens of heaven decorating their celestial abode in anticipation of the feast.126 Such heavenly visions, however, could challenge the bound­aries between retrojection and transtemporal presence. ­Toward the end of the vision cycle Veronica witnessed the ascension of Christ into heaven; she suddenly found herself amid the angelic choirs, ascending with Christ amid legions of angels who welcomed him with incense and spices, ­until the ­Father and the Holy Spirit met him on his return. But then she saw Christ kneeling before the ­Father and reminding him that he had promised to send the Holy Spirit, and asking his blessing for that sending, which the ­Father entrusted to the Son.127 Is Veronica h ­ ere entering into a past event, or does the event occur in heaven and thus outside of time? Witnessing the ascension and the sending of the Holy Spirit raised that ambiguity b­ ecause t­hose events entailed connections between heaven and earth, between eternity and time, and more than the incarnation of Christ they invited imagination of what the events might look like from a celestial perspective. The exceptionally realistic portrayal of Veronica’s experience as a kind of time-­travel no doubt derives from her hagiographer’s urge to portray her as distinctive, indeed miraculous, capable of ­doing literally what ­others can only imagine d­ oing. If she is to be recognized as a saint, she must be not only imitanda but admiranda, and this experience of hers surely is meant as cause for wonderment. It also distances her more from ordinary pious Christians, who might recognize that Christ is pre­sent to them but could not easily suppose themselves becoming in this way pre­sent to the historical events of his life.

124. ​VVB 2.6, cf. 2.7; 5.12; 6.14; 6.15. 125. ​VVB 4.2.1, 4.22.42. 126. ​VVB 2.2. 127. ​VVB 21.41–22.42.

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The Liturgical Experience of Dorothea of Montau Dorothea of Montau would scarcely have had the sort of communal experience of liturgy that nuns enjoyed. Even when she was an anchoress in a cell attached to the cathedral in the town of Marienwerder, she was not a nun and did not have a nun’s participatory engagement with the liturgy. Still, Johannes Marienwerder wrote an entire book, his Book of Feast Days, in which she experiences the presence of Christ keyed not so much to liturgical ser­vices as to the cycle of liturgical feasts. Once again, however, as in most other sources, the feasts serve less than we might expect as occasions for retrojection; a feast day is the occasion for noting Christ’s presence, but the link to the specific feast is often tenuous. At one point Marienwerder summed up the nine ways Christ brought Dorothea into alignment with the liturgical year. Three of ­these w ­ ere anticipatory: he alerted her to the feasts, he led her to prepare herself for them, and he wished that she refrain from conversation with p­ eople at vespers, prime, and other canonical hours and f­ree herself for cele­bration of the feast. Two involved revelations regarding the saints: he revealed what was done in heaven for a feast, and he disclosed how a saint or saints lived in the world and now in heaven. Three had to do with spiritual ­favors imparted to her or ­others: he showed her the joys to be had before and in each feast, he bestowed upon her special new joys on each feast day, and he sent down the Holy Spirit upon her not only on special feasts but practically each day over several years. Most generally, he advanced her devotion and thus indirectly that of ­others who read or heard of her experience.128 The first feast touched upon in the Book of Feast Days is the Annunciation. For the first and only time, Marienwerder gives a detailed description of the setting for the biblical event before discussing Dorothea’s cele­bration of the feast: In Nazareth ­there was a poor and chilly ­house set apart from other ­houses, with a passageway on each side barely wide enough for two carriages to pass each other. Each wall had a doorway; each door led to the outside except for the one to the east, which opened onto the chamber in which the Virgin was enclosed. The east wall of that chamber had two narrow win­dows, placed so high that she could read only by standing up to catch the meager light that shone through them. Beneath the win­dows was a platform, raised a foot or a bit more off the ground, on which stood a lectern with a cross for its base, a shaft arising from the center of the cross, 128. ​LdF c. 97, p. 169.



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with the supporting beam of the lectern below the level of the win­dows, and ­there lay the Virgin’s book, which was scarcely a palm wide and a bit more in length. When the Virgin had spent some time reading from the book before one win­dow, she would move it to the other win­dow, then she would sit on her stool and reflect on what she had read. Lying prostrate on the floor, she would praise God with her prayer.129 At the beginning of the book, Marienwerder thus depicts the Virgin residing in a chamber similar to the anchorhold in which Dorothea herself spent her final days u ­ nder Marienwerder’s supervision. He is careful to specify that the chamber was scarcely open to the outer world; the precious rays of sunlight by which the Virgin read w ­ ere so narrow that she had to move her lectern about to enable her reading. Like Dorothea, the Virgin occupied her time in this chamber with pious exercises that included prayers and prostrations. None of this is placed in Dorothea’s mouth or clearly represented as a revelation given to her, but it frames the account of her revelations by suggesting that her physical environment was modeled on that of the Virgin Annunciate. To be sure, it is not always clear ­whether Marienwerder is telling of Dorothea’s experience before or a­ fter her enclosure in her cell; the book is or­ga­nized according to the liturgical year, not the chronology of her life, so e­ arlier and l­ ater experiences are juxtaposed and not consistently distinguished. For precisely that reason, this opening scene helps establish a kind of teleology in the book: Dorothea is seen as always having been inclined t­oward reclusion, and even when she was still a married ­woman in the world, she tended to see the world as if remotely, through the narrow win­dow of a cell. One might expect the setting of the scene for the Annunciation to be followed by a narrative of the event, the archangel’s declaration to Mary that she is to be the ­mother of God, but that is not the direction in which Marienwerder proceeds. He says that on the day before the feast Dorothea pondered what ser­vice she might render the Virgin, and Christ spoke to her soul, telling her to meditate on how Mary was sitting, what she was reading, and how she was disposed when the angel came to her. ­Because she did not know the answers to t­ hese questions, Christ told her. The Virgin herself then appeared to her. Dorothea considered in detail how the Virgin appeared at the Annunciation, and then how the child was formed out of the Virgin’s blood. The image of the infant that came to her remained impressed on her memory for many weeks.130 The dialogue at the heart of the Annunciation narrative in Luke’s gospel was thus subordinated to the ­mental equivalent of devotional 129. ​LdF c. 2, p. 6. 130. ​LdF c. 3, pp. 7–9.

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images, u ­ ntil fi­nally, on the day of the feast, she saw the Virgin in rapid sequence conceiving Jesus, bearing him, and rejoining him in heaven.131 Dorothea was engaged with the gospel narrative, but the narrative was largely focused on frozen scenes she might have seen in painting, and the act of engagement is almost as impor­tant as the narrative itself, the act of memoratio nearly as significant as the memorata. Her experience of the Nativity further illustrates the complexity of her engagement with sacred narrative. The historical event is witnessed at a ­g reat temporal distance but seems to be experienced, at least at first, from a ­g reat spatial distance. As the hour of Christ’s birth approached, she was “illumined by an infused light sent from above” and was able to see sharply though from far away. She beheld from afar a cave or stable in Bethlehem, in which Mary and Joseph found lodging. In the spirit she saw the Virgin dressed in white, with her back to a manger, her face to the east. Dorothea herself had been experiencing pain as if in childbirth, but as she now beheld the Virgin, this pain was taken from her. Briefly she was in rapture, then she returned to herself. Christ, speaking presumably as an adult, in a kind of voice-­over, said she should prepare a bath, ­because the hour of his birth was at hand. She then again experienced pains such as she had when she was giving birth bodily; the Virgin’s childbearing was thought to have been painless, but Dorothea’s participation was not. She cried out to Christ, asking how long he would put off his coming; he said she should ask him to be able to bear him perfectly in her heart. She turned again to the Virgin in the lodging, and so long as she looked at the Virgin, she was again somewhat soothed. She asked Christ when he would console her; he replied that she should ask him that she might wrap him in swaddling clothes in her heart, and bear him in the chamber of her soul, raise him and nourish and clothe him, and that a new star might lead her to the child. She should inform Marienwerder that she had never wept so much in her ­actual childbirth as in the pre­sent Nativity. If communion had not then been given her, she thought she would have died.132 In short, she had a vision of the event about to happen but not actually occurring; she did not become a participant observer in Christ’s historical birth, but as she saw the event about to take place, she experienced within herself a spiritual analogue to the event. One event that she experienced in a sustained narrative vision was the adoration of the Magi, or Three Kings, on the feast of the Epiphany.133 Why this 131. ​LdF c. 7, pp. 14–15. 132. ​LdF c. 14, pp. 29–30. 133. ​Ernst Köpke, Johannes von Hildesheim (Brandenburg a.d. Havel: Müller, 1878), edits the classic late medieval Historia beatissimorum trium regum, but that extended legend would prob­ably not have been accessible to Dorothea.



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feast in par­tic­ul­ ar should lead to absorption in the narrative, which was heavi­ly encrusted with legend, is not immediately clear. But the adoration of the Magi is the biblical event that would provide the most obvious narrative context for repre­sen­ta­tions of the Virgin and Child, and devotional engagement with such images might well lead to a fascination with its implied prototype. Dorothea saw the Kings approaching magnificently with a ­great retinue. She saw the Virgin with the child in a lodging, and the Kings coming and seeking the child, with beasts that w ­ ere worn out from the journey. She noted how the Kings made their offerings. The light in which Jesus and his ­mother ­were enveloped was spiritual, unlike any light vis­i­ble to the bodily eye. Christ and the Virgin gave her commentary on the scene she beheld in this vision: just as the Kings came with ­great desire, so she too should be mad with desire, for many ­people want Christ but few seek him with such exertion; the ­mother did not bind or wrap up her son’s hands, ­because he wanted them ­free to receive ­those desiring to come to him and to grant generous gifts to all ­those asking anything of him; the Kings presented their gifts but went away much richer; they did not fear death but went forth like martyrs; their offerings w ­ ere made secretly, and Christ did not want any outsiders pre­sent but wished to appear to them wondrously, confirming and augmenting their faith.134 As for ­others, so too for Dorothea of Montau the link between feasts and biblical narrative is in other cases often tenuous. The story is often more presupposed than told. On the feast of the Transfiguration, Christ tells Dorothea that p­ eople marvel at the joy Saint Peter experienced in his Transfiguration, but they are not similarly awestruck at the marvelous ­things he does for ­others who have never seen him with their bodily eyes.135 On Pentecost he notes that the Apostles’ Pentecostal gift of many tongues has inspired much commentary, but he has taught her many “words and sayings” that are generally unknown.136 For Palm Sunday, Christ gives Dorothea an allegorical and moralizing interpretation of the ass: she herself should be bridled like an ass in her senses and manners, and like an ass she should appear foolish and asinine to worldly ­people.137 She experienced the events of the Passion not as a coherent narrative but as a complicated tableau vivant that she examined from one ­angle and then another, seeing ­people striking blows on Christ, punching him, scourging him h ­ ere, crowning him t­ here, elsewhere crucifying him, inflicting all the other torments upon him “in distinct locations round about” 134. ​LdF cc. 24–26, pp. 46–51. 135. ​LdF c. 80, p. 137. 136. ​LdF c. 72, p. 122. 137. ​LdF c. 44, p. 75; further on he interprets a male ass as the soul and a she-­ass as the body, c. 44, pp. 75–76.

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as she sat in the midst of the scenes. In this case she was literally at the center of the experience. She wished to respond with b­ itter compassion, but instead she felt sweetness and joy; she scarcely wept at all. This vision continued throughout Good Friday and into Holy Saturday.138 On the last Good Friday of her life her wish for tears of compassion was granted: she sobbed inconsolably for five hours as she saw Christ pre­sent to her while being betrayed, bound, pushed, pierced, led about savagely, scourged, crowned, crucified, and subject to vari­ous forms of abuse, and meanwhile she saw Mary through a veil.139 On her last Easter she felt Christ descend from heaven into her soul with ­g reat sound, like a g­ reat crash of thunder, but spiritually and not bodily. The sound was as if he was falling on her along with the entire sky and the church and cell, so she thought she would die, but a­ fter that ferocious sound she felt a g­ reat and pleasant spiritual rain fall on her.140 Dorothea’s cele­bration of the sanctoral cycle, the feast days of the saints, focuses at least as much on Christ as on the saints themselves. This part of the Book of Feast Days gives an encyclopedic survey of the ways saints functioned in late medieval devotion: as figures in legend, as moral exemplars, as name patrons, as subjects of artistic depiction. Amid all ­these ele­ments of devotion to the saints, however, Dorothea maintained an almost constant sense that Christ remained pre­sent, accompanying the saints and guiding her veneration. She commented once that when she first began to know Christ rightly and to adhere wholly to him, she cared nothing about the feasts of the saints, but focused entirely on Christ, but then she came to love them cordially as her dear friends.141 Christ instructed her about the saints and the ways they should be honored.142 On the feast day of Saint Catherine of Alexandria, legendary among other ­things for her mystical contact with Christ, Dorothy enjoyed her own mystical encounter with him.143 In the tradition of late medieval meditations on the life of Christ, Dorothea saw herself as a participant observer. Mechthild of Magdeburg also had narrative visions in which she became a participant in events of the gospel, or in quotidian moments associated with t­ hose events, as did Margery Kempe,144 and all three ­women joined in the action specifically when Christ’s ­mother was 138. ​LdF c. 50, p. 83. 139. ​LdF c. 53, p. 86. 140. ​LdF c. 59, pp.  95–96; the Holy Spirit, too, comes with a ­g reat sound and tumult, c. 99, pp. 172–73. 141. ​LdF c. 97, p. 169; cf. LdF c. 127, p. 216. 142. ​LdF c. 117, p. 199; c. 98, p. 170; c. 99, pp. 171–72; c. 105, p. 181; c. 109, p. 186; cc. 110–11, pp. 187–89; c. 119, p. 201. 143. ​LdF c. 130, pp. 219–22. 144. ​FLG 5.23, pp. 362–69 (Tobin, 198–200); BMK 1.72 and 1.80 (Windeatt, 214–15 and 231–35).



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pre­sent and allowing them to interact with her and her son. The scenario is natu­ral: one approaches a young child with consent from a supervising parent. In this special case, however, the consent is to an ­imagined transition from engagement with personages who are spiritually pre­sent, to entry into a tableau vivant that actually does become alive. Dorothea participated in taking care of the infant Jesus, offering to help give him a bath, warm him, wrap him in swaddling clothes, and carry him about.145 When it came time to leave the church where she had spent the entire day, the child Jesus suggested she should ask his ­mother for permission to take him home with her, which would do the Virgin no harm b­ ecause she would at the same time be keeping hold of him; Dorothea was anxious that the ­mother would not grant request, but still she asked, and the request was granted.146 She had visions in which the Virgin and sometimes she herself played with the child Jesus.147 Christ once filled her soul and body and all her members, which moved as if she was playing with the child Jesus, repeatedly lifting him up and tossing him in the air, then catching him as he came down, which she did with g­ reat delight—­a game that might be called “child’s play” or “childlike play” or a “game of tossing.”148 For Dorothea, participation was sometimes occasion for anxiety. She played with Christ, but she could not always count on being allowed to participate in this play. Once the Virgin held out her child to Dorothea, but then when Dorothea was about to take him, she quickly drew him back, back and forth, gladdening and saddening her, arousing her to keener desire.149 Even when she was allowed to hold the child, she might need to hold him gingerly, ­because greater freedom implied confidence that she could not claim. Christ once said she did not dare take him in her hands and lift him up agilely and then let him go, as she saw his ­mother playfully ­doing, for she was not as certain about him as was his m ­ other, who in confirmed holiness was not anxious about his leaving her. For Dorothea it was necessary to hold him firmly, fearing lest he withdraw from her, slipping from her hands.150 She suffered acutely from separation anxiety. If she had a vision of Christ with his ­mother, she feared they would both leave her.151 On the feast of the Ascension she was anxious that Christ would ascend into heaven and not return; he noted this anxiety and told her he would show how to ascend into heaven ­after him.152 145. ​LdF c. 17, p. 35; c. 22, p. 42; c. 23, pp. 44–45; c. 31, p. 59; c. 55, pp. 89–90. 146. ​LdF c. 15, p. 31. 147. ​LdF c. 19, p. 38; c. 12, p. 26. 148. ​LdF c. 12, p. 26: “lusus pueri, lusus puerilis, lusuum elevationes.” 149. ​LdF c. 12, pp. 25–26. 150. ​LdF c. 30, p. 58. 151. ​LdF c. 31, p. 59. 152. ​LdF c. 63, p. 104; c. 68, p. 115.

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Dorothea spent much of her time in church, and in her final year she was enclosed in an anchorhold attached to a church, but the Book of Feast Days tells very ­little about the ser­vices she heard. Repeatedly it mentions m ­ usic being sung, but frequently the point is that she is so abstracted that she only faintly hears the singing, the organs, the ringing of bells, or anything e­ lse ­going on in church.153 Rarely does the text specify a par­tic­ul­ ar text that she heard being sung.154 To the extent that she did hear the ­music, however, it was so sweet to her ears that it sounded as if it w ­ ere the singing of heaven, or of “eternal life.”155 This emphasis on ­music would be particularly understandable for the months she spent enclosed in her anchorhold, where she would much of the time have heard the liturgical m ­ usic outside her cell without seeing all of the liturgical action. The strains of ­music would have come to her as if from a distance, and they might have had a haunting effect, like sounds at night coming from outdoors. To be sure, it is not clear that all the references are to her experience in the anchorhold; at least some of the time the point is not that she is physically removed from the liturgy but that she is abstracted and thus mentally removed, and even when she is in the thick of the cele­bration she hears it as if from across a chasm. But the time she spent in the anchorhold at the end of her life is the point of reference for the entire compilation, and even what she had experienced e­ arlier gets told as if it w ­ ere similar to what she experienced in the cell. To a very high degree, observing the feasts of the liturgical year meant, for Dorothea, being well prepared for them.156 Even as a young girl she would prepare for liturgical feast days.157 Christ instructed her to prepare, especially for feasts honoring him and his m ­ other.158 As the feast of the Ascension arrived, Christ told her to adorn her cell, opening images of saints, providing a seat with a cushion for the Holy Spirit, putting on a veil and a cloak as if she ­were ­going to church in public.159 She made herself ready by holding vigils, exercising disciplines, fasting, praying, weeping, confessing her sins, almsgiving, and cultivating a sense of desire.160 Christ told her to make a long confession to him as preparation for a feast.161 The desire she experienced as a feast 153. ​LdF c. 11, p. 24; c. 15, p. 31; c. 50, p. 83; c. 58, p. 94; c. 65, p. 107; c. 68, p. 114. 154. ​LdF c. 18, p. 36. 155. ​LdF c. 20, pp. 39–40; c. 29, p. 55; c. 71, p. 119; c. 98, p. 170; c. 112, p. 190; c. 115, p. 195; c. 122, p. 204. 156. ​LdF c. 22, p. 43; c. 31, pp. 58–59; c. 59, p. 97; c. 81, p. 138; cf. LDM 1.19, pp. 52–53. 157.  LdF prol., p. 3. 158. ​LdF c. 24, p. 46; c. 26, p. 49; c. 85, p. 144; c. 81, p. 138. 159. ​LdF c. 64, p. 105. 160. ​LdF c. 69, p. 115–16. 161. ​LdF c. 91, pp. 155–56.



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day approached was like that of the “holy f­ athers” of the Old Testament who yearned for Christ’s physical presence.162 Christ told her to pray that other ­people, especially her spiritual ­children, would be prepared for upcoming feast days.163 Secular p­ eople would get ready for Christmas in a worldly manner by capturing and killing game, preparing clothing and food, and so forth, but without properly preparing themselves in their souls; their care for carnal ­things was greater than for spiritual.164 Repeatedly she was anxious about not being ready.165 When a feast day arrived, she sometimes confessed that she had not prepared properly, and she compared her situation to that of a host expecting distinguished guests but not set to receive them, or she might say she was giving hospitality to Christ and his m ­ other and the heavenly host but had neglected to fish and cook, a meta­phor ­here for exercises of charity and other virtues.166 When Christ upbraided her for her negligence, being unprepared for feast days was on the list of her failings.167 Preparing for feast days was linked with preparing to receive communion—­ indeed, every­ one was expected to prepare carefully before receiving communion—­and for this too Dorothea felt a strong sense of obligation and anxiety.168 Once she was preparing to receive communion by the customary act of spreading out a white cloth (formerly a garment) at the win­dow of her cell where it was administered, but Christ asked why she was setting her t­ able when she had not yet cooked, so she held off on spreading the cloth ­until she had prepared properly by confessing her sins.169 This emphasis on preparation for a feast day and for communion helps to link Dorothea’s exceptional experience with more ordinary observance. Preparing for communion was expected of all. Anticipation of a feast is something a modern observer can perhaps most easily compare with the expectation of and preparation for Christmas, but churchgoers have at least some understanding of the work that liturgists and members of altar guilds do to prepare for any feast. Dorothea’s complaint about p­ eople absorbed in secular but not 162. ​LdF c. 9, p. 21. 163. ​LdF c. 1.6, pp. 32–33; c. 69, p. 117; c. 91, pp. 155–56. 164. ​LdF c. 8, pp. 17–18; cf. c. 69, p. 115–16; p. 117 n. 1. A gloss added in one manuscript says temporal t­ hings too are gifts of the Holy Spirit, b­ ecause gifts of God, who makes the sun (reading “solem” for “solum”) rise on evil and good and whose works ad extra are undivided as operations of persons. 165. ​LdF c. 9, pp. 20–21; c. 10, pp. 21–22; c. 32, p. 61; c. 59, p. 97. 166. ​LdF c. 31, pp. 59–60; c. 33, p. 62; c. 127, p. 216. 167. ​LdF c. 63, p. 104. 168. ​LdF c. 129, pp. 218–19; c. 114, p. 192. See Browe, “Die Kommunionvorbereitung im Mittelalter,” in Browe, Die Eucharistie im Mittelalter, 173–98 (196, with reference to Dorothea). 169. ​LdF c. 67, p. 112.

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spiritual preparation also has modern resonance: a ­woman like Dorothea represents the exceptionally devout version of more ordinary piety, which in turn stands out against the worldly preoccupations of ­those who ­were least devout but perhaps most ordinary.

Conclusion As Anna Harrison has said, “However permeable the boundary between the spirituality of corporate religious worship and that which was alive outside the context of the liturgy, ­there seems to have been something about the liturgy that encouraged intellectual curiosity and creativity, focused reflection on the self, induced vision, and provided a spur to ecstasy.”170 Liturgy is sometimes the condition and sometimes the occasion for Christophany. It is the condition when Christ’s manifestation is integrally related to the liturgical cele­bration: when the child Christ is seen in the elevated host, when Christ himself celebrates the mass or administers communion, when communion leads to consciousness of Christ’s mystical presence that is indistinguishable from his sacramental presence, or when the manifestation of Christ is somehow linked with the liturgical feast being celebrated. Frequently, however, the connection between Christophany and liturgy is much looser: Christ becomes manifest during the liturgy, or more specifically at communion, but ­there is no clear reason why he needs to be manifested at that liturgical moment. The distinction between condition and occasion is not always clear; h ­ ere too t­ here is a spectrum rather than a sharp disjunction. In any event, even when the par­tic­u­lar liturgical feast or ser­vice is less obviously relevant to the experience of Christophany, the communal exercise of liturgy is often profoundly impor­tant as a context for that experience.

170. ​Harrison, “Thousand and Thousands of Lovers,” 168.

C h a p te r   6

Person, Personality, and Gender

Most of the figures discussed in this book ­were ­women. This is surely not ­because only ­women thought of Christ as pre­sent to them, and in the history of Chris­tian­ity ­there certainly have been men who reported communication with Christ, but in the late medieval West it was ­women especially who tended to speak of Christ’s presence as a sustained, regularly occurring phenomenon, to which we are h ­ ere referring as his mystical presence. Some might suggest that ­there is nothing surprising in this gender imbalance. Susan Starr Sered has surveyed religions across the world that are “dominated by ­women” and has found that ­women tend ­toward spirit possession, in which beneficent spirits descend and share the bodies of w ­ omen mediums, while men tend rather t­oward shamanism, in which the soul ascends in ecstatic flight, leaving the body ­behind. The more experienced a ­woman is as a medium, the more her own soul remains alongside the possessing spirit; the medium “entertains” the spirit and may engage it in dialogue. Sered suggests that w ­ omen’s role as medium is not an abnormal phenomenon that must be explained in terms of social or sexual or some other deprivation. Rather, it is a normal experience, perhaps recognized as such among ­women by analogy with their experience of being inhabited by another being in pregnancy, and in any case inhibited among men by the forces of socialization. Another way

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to phrase the point is that w ­ omen, unlike men, are not taught not to speak of spirits dwelling in them.1 It would indeed be easy to interpret late medieval ­women who report experiencing Christ as pre­sent and communicating with them as one manifestation of a broader tendency such as Sered describes. The language of possession is not common in this context, and the w ­ omen we are dealing with do not typically begin acting as if ­under the control of an alien personality, but Christ is said to be perceived by their inner senses, and they often (though not always) experience him in a state of rapture that cuts them off from contact with their environment.2 Still, what­ever parallels may be drawn, the figures we are discussing lived within a religious culture that cultivated a sense of Christ’s presence in terms specific to that culture, and the accounts of their experience owe a ­g reat deal to specific theological, devotional, and literary conventions. If we want to understand the role of gender in this setting, we must look mainly at this specific culture and ­these conventions. At least six ­factors seem relevant. First, although men too could be meta­phor­ically female and become in an extended sense brides of Christ, bridal status was more centrally relevant to ­women than to men.3 Mystical interpretations of the Song of Songs, which became especially prominent among Cistercians in the twelfth ­century, assumed that Christ was the bridegroom and that the devout soul played the role of the bride, ­whether the soul was of a ­woman or a man.4 But a nun was ex officio a bride of Christ, formally established as such at her consecration, and as Sarah McNamer has emphasized, this was an officially recognized status for nuns in a way that did not apply to monks or other males.5 Even a ­woman who was not a nun might be referred to consistently in hagiography as a “bride,” meaning bride of Christ; this was the way Dorothea of Montau’s confessor and biographer normally referred to her, to take only one example. 1. ​Susan Starr Sered, Priestess, ­Mother, Sacred ­Sister: Religions Dominated by ­Women (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). 2. ​See Nancy Caciola, Discerning Spirits: Divine and Demonic Possession in the M ­ iddle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003); Dyan Elliott, Proving W ­ oman: Female Spirituality and Inquisitional Culture in the ­Later ­Middle Ages (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2004). 3. ​On bridal imagery see Rabia Gregory, Marrying Jesus in Medieval and Early Modern Northern Eu­rope: Popu­lar Culture and Religious Reform (Farnham: Ashgate, 2016), a work that w ­ ill be discussed in a ­later chapter. 4. ​Caroline Walker Bynum, Jesus as ­Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High M ­ iddle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 162; Martha G. Newman, “Crucified by the Virtues: Monks, Lay ­Brothers, and W ­ omen in Thirteenth-­Century Cistercian Saints’ Lives,” in Gender and Difference in the ­Middle Ages, ed. Sharon A. Farmer and Carol Braun Pasternack (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 188 and 199. 5. ​Sarah McNamer, Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medieval Compassion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010).



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Depiction of Christ as a communicating presence, speaking with and sometimes appearing to a w ­ oman, could be a natu­ral expression of her role as Christ’s bride. Second, ­there was homology and sometimes a supporting link between the mystical presence of Christ and the cura monialium and spiritual direction more generally.6 Nuns, tertiaries, and anchoresses had men who served as their confessors, their confidants, and in some cases eventually biographers.7 Members of religious o ­ rders, especially Dominicans, exercised the official role of caring for nuns and other w ­ omen. Christ was the ultimate exemplar of this role. When a ­woman received communication from Christ, it might have been pos­ si­ble for Christ and the confessor to become rivals, giving conflicting counsel, but a confessor would be unlikely to recognize such a rival as in fact Christ; a ­woman who claimed that Christ was regularly contradicting the advice of her confessor would quickly be branded as delusional or as the victim of demonic deception.8 What did happen was that Christ and the confessor played parallel and supporting roles. The revelations ascribed to Christ might be a reason for the confessor to hold the ­woman in awe, and Christ might impart messages and insights to her that the confessor could not have provided, but the triangular relationship was still a collaborative one, in which the confessor gave institutional support and validation for the w ­ oman privileged with revelations.9 Third, ­there was benefit to t­ hese male confessors, too, in associating with ­women who communicated with Christ: they ­were often reformers within their o ­ rders and more broadly in Christian society, and their contact with Christ through ­these ­women could strengthen their role as reformers. The connection could be direct or indirect. Raymond of Capua, the confessor and biographer of Catherine of Siena, became the general of the Dominican order and 6. ​Jeffrey  F. Hamburger, “Art, Enclosure and the Cura monialium: Prolegomena in the Guise of a Postscript,” Gesta 31 (1992): 108–34; Gertrud Jaron Lewis, “­Women and the Cura monialium in the Books of ­Sisters,” in A Leaf from the ­Great Tree of God: Essays in Honour of Ritamary Bradley, SFCC, ed. Margot H. King (Toronto: Peregrina, 1994), 137–55; Thomas Lentes, “Bild, Reform und cura monialium: Bildverständnis und Bildgebrauch im Buch der Reformacio Predigerordens des Johannes Meyer (†1485),” in Dominicains et Dominicaines en Alsace: XIIIe–­XXe s., ed. Jean-­Luc Eichenlaub (Colmar: Conseil général du Haut-­Rhin, 1996), 177–95. 7. ​John W. Coakley, ­Women, Men, and Spiritual Power: Female Saints and Their Male Collaborators (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006); Fiona  J. Griffiths and Julie Hotchin, eds., Partners in Spirit: ­Women, Men, and Religious Life in Germany, 1100–1500 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2014). 8. ​For instructive comparison see Renate Blumenfeld-­Kosinski, The Strange Case of Ermine de Reims: A Medieval ­Woman between Demons and Saints (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015); Coakley, ­Women, Men, and Spiritual Power, 89–110 (chap. 5, “Self and Saint: Peter of Dacia on Christine of Stommeln”); Barbara Newman, The Permeable Self: Five Medieval Relationships (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021), chap. 5. 9. ​Dyan Elliott, “Authorizing a Life: The Collaboration of Dorothea of Montau and John Marienwerder,” in Gendered Voices: Medieval Saints and Their Interpreters, ed. Catherine Mooney (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 168–91.

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a leading proponent of the Observant reform movement within the order, whose association with Catherine and through her also with Christ lent authority to his reforming work. Johannes Marienwerder, who played a similar role for Dorothea of Montau, was not a zealous reformer but did have a background in reform-­minded circles in Prague, where he had been associated with o ­ thers whose reforming fervor was joined with re­spect and care for holy ­women.10 Fourth, in late medieval devotional culture, while ­women in convents ­were telling at length and in detail about their own and other nuns’ inner lives, men too seem commonly to have assumed that ­women’s inward experience was more in­ter­est­ing than their own. The difference shows most markedly in hagiography. The vitae for male saints tend to be shorter and focused almost exclusively on their outward lives, their activities in the world. The written lives of ­women saints tend to be far more extensive and to dwell at greater length on their inward lives.11 Would readers have assumed that men did not have rich inner lives that might involve close contact and even communication with Christ? The writings of Walter Hilton and ­others suggest other­wise. Men as well as ­women could be mystically inclined, and their mysticism could be equally Christocentric, but the inner lives of ­women seem to have held fascination that t­ hose of men could not equal. At times t­ here is a kind of spiritual voyeurism in play when male writers and readers gaze intently into the souls of holy ­women. ­Whether that was the case or not, writing on the inward lives of ­women enjoyed the exceptional popularity that came from its assumed fascination. Fifth, communication with Christ gave authentication to w ­ omen that they could not hold from institutional sources: they could not be ordained or receive university degrees, but they could receive revelations directly from Christ. ­Women and men alike might experience revelations, but they tended to weigh more heavi­ly in the writing of ­women ­because they ­were needed for authentication.12 We should not assume, however, that the ­women who claimed communication from Christ ­were typically addressing ­matters of doctrinal controversy, or indeed strictly doctrinal issues at all, or that they necessarily intended to establish their authority before a wide audience. Some did address 10. ​Stephen Mossman, “Dorothea von Montau and the Masters of Prague,” Oxford German Studies 39 (2010): 114–17. 11. ​Richard Kieckhefer, “Holiness and the Culture of Devotion: Remarks on Some Late Medieval Male Saints,” in Images of Sainthood in Medieval Eu­rope, ed. Renate Blumenfeld-­Kosinski and Timea Szell (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), 288–305. 12. ​On this point see, for example, Barbara Newman, “Hildegard of Bingen: Visions and Validation,” Church History 54 (1985): 163–75; and Patricia Skinner, Studying Gender in Medieval Eu­rope: Historical Approaches (London: Palgrave, 2018), 129–30.



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­ atters of doctrine, and some hoped for wide readership, but the lit­er­a­ture m of revelation was typically written in the first instance for internal consumption within the monastic community, and if a nun was being set forth as an authority, it was often not on her own initiative but that of fellow nuns, and the authority sought was in the eyes of other nuns. Still, even for lit­er­a­ture written by and for nuns, the claim of revelation was a claim of authority. Sixth, the presence of Christ to ­women in par­tic­u­lar was an established and self-­reinforcing convention. This is perhaps the least in­ter­est­ing but by no means a negligible f­actor, and the one that links and extends all the o ­ thers. What­ever the original reasons for the tendency of ­women in par­tic­u­lar to claim revelations from Christ, once the convention was established, it became a widely accepted expectation. It provided a vocabulary for speaking of experiences that might other­wise be expressed differently—­and, if differently expressed, then through the reciprocity of language and life, differently experienced. The convention was especially cultivated, made familiar and thus accepted as natu­ral, and perpetuated in German monastic communities, although it was never exclusive to that setting. Like any other cultural convention, it came to have a life of its own that might feed on but became partly in­de­pen­dent of other ­factors.13 Even when the ­woman’s bridal role was not strongly emphasized, the ­woman who communicated with Christ was an established and recognizable type. The ­factor that to some might seem most obvious—­that experience of Christ’s presence was chiefly a manifestation of female eroticism, once dismissed as hysterical or other­wise pathological—­calls for cautious response. In some cases the erotic dimension of the experience is overt, and often it is most so when the texts deviate most markedly from the conventional language of erotic spirituality. Angela of Foligno tells of her own premature burial in Christ’s tomb: In a state of ecstasy, she found herself in the sepulcher with Christ. She said she had first of all kissed Christ’s breast—­and saw that he lay dead, with his eyes closed—­then she kissed his mouth, from which, she added, a delightful fragrance emanated, one impossible to describe. This moment lasted only a short while. Afterward, she placed her cheek on Christ’s own and he, in turn, placed his hand on her other cheek, pressing her closely to him. At that moment, Christ’s faithful one heard him telling her: “Before I was laid in the sepulcher, I held you this tightly to me.” Even though she 13. ​The argument h ­ ere is parallel to that of Gordon Allport regarding what he called “functional autonomy”: reacting against psychoanalytic assumptions, Allport emphasized the capacity for motivations to develop and become autonomous from their originating circumstances. See Gordon W. Allport, “The Functional Autonomy of Motives,” American Journal of Psy­chol­ogy 50 (1937): 141–56.

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understood that it was Christ telling her this, nonetheless she saw him lying ­there with eyes closed, lips motionless, exactly as he was when he lay dead in the sepulcher. Her joy was im­mense and indescribable.14 This striking denial of death, the insistence that even in the tomb Christ was capable of full-­blooded life and physical expression of affection, is more than anything e­ lse a commentary on the paradox of a God-­man (Angela’s most frequent way of speaking of Christ) who dies yet cannot die and whose surviving divinity manifests itself in boldly erotic contact that strikingly establishes its capacity to sustain a kind of life even in the tomb. Such stark eroticism is not exclusive to ­women’s experiences or texts about ­women. While eroticism for Angela serves as commentary on the paradox of life even in death, for Friedrich Sunder it gives occasion to reflect on the fluidity of playfulness and ecstasy. Christ came to Sunder most often as the infant, the child Christ, and they played together on the bed of his heart or his soul, a bed strewn with flowers, where they embraced each other and kissed and made merry while the angels and saints played for them on musical instruments.15 In our day, a priest who admitted fantasizing about such erotic play with a young child would no doubt be reported to his superiors, but Sunder and his contemporaries seem to have been confident that the child Christ could fend for himself. When Sunder had suffered Christ’s absence, he asked Mary to reconcile him with her son, so she put the child in his arms and said he should do the reconciling himself. He asked the child where he had been so long, and in a child’s voice Christ answered that he wanted to come but his m ­ other would not let him. Once when Sunder had been feeling abandoned by Christ, he took communion and used this as the occasion for a display of tough love: The soul [i.e., Sunder’s] said to the child, “It is said that you are so strong that no one can match you in strength. Now let me see if I can overcome you.” And he fell on the divine child and pressed him quickly to himself, and said, Non dimittam te nisi benedixeris michi [cf. Genesis 32:26]. Then the child said to his m ­ other, “O m ­ other dear, help me, b­ ecause this soul has bound me tight in its love bonds and w ­ on’t let me go.” Our Lady said, “My dear child, help yourself and listen to what the soul has to ask.” Then the child said to the soul, “O dear soul, let me go!” The soul said, 14. ​AF Memoriale, c. 7 (Lachance, 182). 15. ​“Das Gnaden-­Leben des Friedrich Sunder, Klosterkaplan zu Engelthal,” in Siegfried Ringler, Viten-­und Offenbarungsliteratur in Frauenklöstern des Mittelalters (Munich: Artemis, 1980), 413–14; Leonard Patrick Hindsley, The Mystics of Engelthal: Writings from a Medieval Monastery (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 1998), 106; Candela Perpiñan Garcia, “Los ángeles músicos: Estudio de los tipos iconográficos de la narración evangélica,” Anales de historia del arte 21, special issue 2 (2011): 397–411.



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“You can be sure I ­won’t do that ­until you tell me why you are so hard to me.” Then the child said, “I do that ­because you are so dear to me and when you have yearning and torment for me that is more dear than when you have an overflow of my sweetness. Just when you think I have turned from you, I perform my secret work in your soul. And when I wound you most grievously, it is then that I treat you most lovingly. Now let me go!” “No, indeed, not u ­ ntil you tell me how long I must be in this anguish.” Then the child said, “When the time has come, I ­will let you know. Now let me go; what do you want me to do to you?” Then the soul said, “I’m not ­going to do that ­until you promise me that you w ­ ill never part from me.” Then the child said, “­Mother mine, you be my pledge that I w ­ ill gladly do what the soul has asked for.” Then Our Lady said, “I w ­ ill gladly do that, serving as your assurance t­ oward the soul.” “And so you should let me go.” Then the child gave the soul the blessing. Only then did the soul let the lovely child go. Then the soul received g­ reat joy and sweetness from Our Lord’s body, with which it was fed. This of course cannot be taken as a typically male version of theoeroticism, but it is difficult to imagine a ­woman playing quite this rough with the child Christ. If we won­der why men and their biographers ­were reluctant to narrate their intimate relationship with Christ in detail, as w ­ omen so often did, Sunder’s example helps account for this reticence. In the accounts of ­women, monastic and sometimes lay, far more conventional bridal imagery can become routine: ­women are brides of Christ, they are betrothed and married to him, they enter into the bridal chamber, and they receive revelations in a state of rapture. The imagery may be passionate and frankly erotic but in a way that did not easily shock medieval sensibilities.16 Traditional and even conventional imagery could convey a lively sense of character on the side of Christ and on that of his bride. The notion of the soul as bride of Christ was in some re­spects traditional and in other ways innovative. Mystical commentaries on the Song of Songs had always taken the Bridegroom for Christ and the Bride for the Christian soul, ­whether female or male; in this sense a monk as well as a nun could be a bride of Christ. More specifically, a nun was seen as wedded to Christ at her profession, and high medieval lit­er­a­ture for religious ­women developed both the narrative and the iconography of this wedding. To ­these two forms of bridal spirituality, late medieval devotional lit­er­a­ture added two more that 16. ​See especially Alexandra Barratt, “ ‘The ­Woman Who Shares the King’s Bed’: The Innocent Eroticism of Gertrud the G ­ reat of Helfta,” in Intersections of Sexuality and the Divine in Medieval Culture: The Word Made Flesh, ed. Susannah Chewning (London: Taylor and Francis, 2005), 107–19.

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moved in opposite directions. As Rabia Gregory has shown, by the ­fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the notion had been taken over into popu­lar devotional lit­er­at­ ure, and any soul could be seen as wedded to Christ. That all Christians ­were or could be brides of Christ was a commonplace found, for example, in a note appended by a thirteen-­year-­old scribe to a manuscript of 1436, in a devotional work in first found in a manuscript of 1418 and by 1482 available in print, in an apocryphal work associated with Johannes Tauler, and in a prayerbook of 1523 owned by a lay ­woman.17 John of Ruusbroec spoke of dif­fer­ent “comings of our bridegroom Jesus Christ,” one of which “takes place daily in many and vari­ous ways in e­ very loving heart.”18 At roughly the same time, however, the notion of a nun who enjoyed mystical revelations (such as the ­women of Helfta) or a singularly devout laywoman (such as Margery Kempe) as a bride of Christ came to be more fully worked out in the narrative of daily life. Alongside the conventional trope of any soul as the bride of Christ stood the narrative of the exceptional ­woman as one who might expect to interact with Christ in an ongoing way. In view of the widely diffused conventional theme of any Christian as a bride of Christ, Gregory resists the suggestion that bridal mysticism was imposed on ­women by misogynist clerical authorities.19 But when the motif was taken in the opposite direction and worked out in detail in the life of an exceptional individual, it could serve to emphasize the passivity and even abjection of the bride, as we s­ hall see with regard to Dorothea of Montau. Gender dynamics both in life and in texts worked differently inside and outside the monastery. The lit­er­a­ture of Helfta and of the German sister-­books builds on the conventional repre­sen­ta­tion of the nun as Christ’s bride and plays with it creatively, sustaining while adapting the conventions for literary effect, often without obvious relevance to gender dynamics involving mortal males. When w ­ omen outside the monasteries took over the traditions of Christophany and adapted them to their own circumstances, they did so more often in the context of subordination to men, especially their confessors and directors. When we look at the writings that come out of ­women’s monasteries, we find a repre­sen­ta­tion of the nuns and Christ that is intensely, passionately, and sometimes playfully gendered. When we turn to writings by or about w ­ omen outside the monastery, we more often find complicated and even deeply troubled 17. ​Gregory, Marrying Jesus, 5–6 (1436 manuscript), 31–33 (1418 manuscript), 64 (Tauler apocryphon), 148 (1523 prayer book). Hendrik Mande, Een minnentlike claege, ed. Th. Mertens (Erfstadt: Lukassen, 1984), 15–19, gives a dialogue between Christ and the soul, with lengthy speeches on e­ ither side. 18. ​John Ruusbroec, The Spiritual Espousals and Other Works, trans. James A. Wiseman (New York: Paulist, 1985), 47; see Gregory, Marrying Jesus, 125. 19. ​Gregory, Marrying Jesus, 14–15.



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gender dynamics that can only be examined in the par­tic­ul­ ar, and we w ­ ill find that Dorothea of Montau is a particularly in­ter­est­ing and problematic example of such complexities.

Person and Personality A further distinction also relates to gender: as a rule that admits exceptions, ­women who witnessed the communicating presence of Christ tended to conceive him not simply as a person but as a personality. That meant, first of all, seeing him as having variability of mood and manner, sometimes severe and sometimes serene, at times vulnerable and arousing compassion, at other times majestic and inspiring awe. Second, it meant his taking an interest in other personalities as distinct personalities, in t­ hose features that make them who they are, and being in dialogue with them. Third, it entailed his being the b­ earer of a personal history that framed and lent meaning to his pre­sent condition: the single person with two natures who appeared and communicated now had done so also within the historical setting of first-­century Palestine, and he could manifest the same severity that he showed to the Pharisees, the compassion that he lavished on the sick and the penitent, and the grief that he manifested in Gethsemane. All t­ hese marks of personality—­variability, dialogical relationship, and personal history—­are part of being h ­ uman, although they are not specifically ­human. (No reader of the Old Testament could suppose they ­were not also attributes of God.) When they are seen in Christ, they serve as reminders that the person now ubiquitous is the same as the one once circumscribed by par­tic­ul­ar time and place and has a personality available for manifestation and repre­sen­ta­tion.20 ­Because personality is revealed chiefly in relationship, portrayal of Christ’s personality tends to involve display of the mystic’s personality as well. The stories of encounter with Christ give us a sense of how his character is conceived but reveal just as much about the personalities of Mechthild of Hackeborn, Dorothea of Montau, Margery Kempe, and the rest. Sacramental and liturgical presence are for most ­people contexts for the presence of Christ’s person but not typically his personality. The more physical the presence, the less personal. This may seem paradoxical, and perhaps it is. But when Christ or a saint is physically pre­sent, in a consecrated host or in 20. ​The distinction between manifestation with and without personality does not quite correspond to the distinction between cataphatic and apophatic theology, ­because even cataphatic language can be ­limited to abstract expression of divine attributes.

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relics, the presence may be power­f ul but it does not usually manifest personality. His sacramental presence is in substance rather than accidents, as the Scholastics would phrase it, and as a corollary it is in person but not in personality. P ­ eople receiving communion do not ordinarily expect the Christ they receive to greet them effusively, scold them, or converse with them about their circumstances. They are receiving a person—­Jesus Christ, body and blood, soul and divinity—­but in the liturgy and sacraments they do not expect to interact with a personality in the sense defined ­here. Visitors to a Mozarabic church, hearing the imprecation “Be pre­sent! be pre­sent!”—­Adesto, adesto—­might expect Christ to come as a g­ iant pounding on the door, or as a wizard amid fire and smoke, and they might expect him to come with all the personality that a ­g iant or a wizard might possess. In this, specifically, they would be naïve. In daily life as in liturgy, the recognition of Christ’s presence does not necessarily involve experience of a personality. Aelred of Rievaulx speaks of friendship between two individuals as implying the presence of Christ as a third in the triad of friendship, but he does not then tell narratives of Christ interacting with him and his friends.21 Even mystical treatises and sermons did not typically cultivate a sense of Christ’s personality. For one mystical writer the test of spiritual advancement was ­whether one’s life was infused with that of Christ, “For where the Christ life is, Christ is also pre­sent.”22 For Meister Eckhart, the Son of God was born within the soul; indeed the soul becomes the Son, with no distinction, but t­ here is no expectation h ­ ere of dialogue and no reference to historical experience. Still, writers of mystical texts do not all paint with the same brush, and a closer examination may show differences in nuance. In the writings of a few male writers we do find something similar to the mystical presence of Christ that is so frequent in writings by and about ­women—­but it is not quite the same, ­because it is very largely focused on the person of Christ but not on a personality strongly marked by variability, dialogical relationship, and personal history. No doubt Christ figured prominently in the lives as well as the writings of t­ hese men, and they w ­ ere surely familiar with the notion that a man as well as a ­woman could be a bride of Christ. But they did not play out so fully the implication of that image—­namely, that they could have Christ as a constant companion, interacting with them in the concrete particulars of their daily lives. 21. ​Aelred of Rievaulx, Spiritual Friendship, 1.1, trans. Lawrence  C. Braceland, ed. Marsha  L. Dutton (Collegeville, MN: Cistercian Publications, Liturgical Press, 2010), 55. 22. ​ The Theologia Germanica of Martin Luther, ed. and trans. Bengt Hoffman (New York: Paulist, 1980), 75, 132, 83, 89. The ascription to Luther is somewhat misleading; the translation is based on Luther’s edition of the anonymous fourteenth-­century text.



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Walter Hilton Walter Hilton (ca. 1340–96) seems to have studied both canon and civil law, and ­there is evidence for his serving u ­ nder the bishop of Ely, but then he withdrew from the active life and entered into the Augustinian canons at some point in the 1380s. Prominent among the writings he then produced is his Scale of Perfection, written in the first instance for the instruction of an anonymous anchoress. In two passages of the Scale, Hilton expounds his understanding of the presence of Christ.23 He says at one point that he is referring interchangeably to Jesus and to God, since “both are one,” and ­later he says grace, love, Jesus, and God work interchangeably, and “I can therefore use in this writing whichever of ­these four words pleases me,”24 but in fact the term he uses throughout t­ hese two blocks of material is the name “Jesus.” He begins by discussing how the soul should seek, desire, and find Jesus. Desire is stimulated by recalling the name of Jesus, or by any other relevant words or prayers. Desire leads to finding, but finding intensifies desire, for one may find “something of Jesus,” or “a shadow of him,” but in this life one w ­ ill not find Jesus as he is in himself.25 Even if it does not lead to actually seeing Jesus with one’s spiritual eye, the experience of desiring him is better than all visions and revelations, “all the joys of heaven and earth” that might be experienced without such desire.26 Hilton turns to the parable of the lost coin (Luke 15:8–10): the w ­ oman who has lost the coin within her h ­ ouse, which is the soul, seeks it by lighting a lantern, which is reason. Jesus is t­ here all along, and ­there is no need to seek him by r­ unning to Rome or Jerusalem on pilgrimage. He sleeps in one’s heart spiritually as he slept physically in the ship with his apostles; they woke him to save them from the storm at sea, and now one must rouse him with prayer and cries of desire.27 Sin within the heart keeps one from discovering Jesus; instead one seems to find nothing, but one must persist in this sense of nothingness, for Jesus is hidden in it and ­will at last be found.28 That Christ should speak within the soul is something Hilton takes for granted: “He calls you quite often with his sweet secret voice, very quietly stirring your heart to leave all the jangle of vain ­things in your soul and give heed only to him, and to hearing him speak,”29 and it is only the din of vain 23. ​Walter Hilton, The Scale of Perfection, trans. John P. H. Clark and Rosemary Dorward (New York: Paulist, 1991), 1.46–54, 2.40–45. 24. ​Hilton, The Scale of Perfection, 1.26, p. 119; 2.42, p. 292. 25. ​Hilton, The Scale of Perfection, 1.46, pp. 118–19. 26. ​Hilton, The Scale of Perfection, 1.47, p. 120. 27. ​Hilton, The Scale of Perfection, 1.48–49, pp. 120–22. 28. ​Hilton, The Scale of Perfection, 1.52–54, pp. 124–26. 29. ​Hilton, The Scale of Perfection, 1.50, p. 122.

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thoughts and carnal desires that keeps the soul from hearing and even seeing him. While the first block of material speaks mainly of Christ pre­sent and calling out within the soul, the l­ater passage takes over t­ hese themes but adds a stronger emphasis on seeing him with inward or spiritual vision: love opens the spiritual eye “to gaze upon Jesus by the inspiration of special grace,” the soul sighs “to see the face of Jesus,” the “beholding” of Jesus brings about a stillness within the soul, and a soul whose spiritual eye has been opened “to behold Jesus” w ­ ill burn with love and shine with a spiritual light.30 By grace the soul “is drawn into the private chamber, into the sight of our Lord Jesus, and hears his secret counsels.”31 A critic might suggest we should live only in faith without desiring or valuing spiritual feelings, heeding the words “the just lives by faith” (Galatians 3:11). Hilton replies that we should indeed not desire or value bodily feelings, but we should always desire the spiritual feelings he speaks of: We should desire always to feel the lively inspiration of grace caused by the spiritual presence of Jesus in our soul, if we could, and to have him always with reverence in our sight; and always to feel the sweetness of his love by a wonderful homeliness of his presence. This should be our life and our feeling in grace, according to the mea­sure of his gift in whom all grace exists; to some ­people more and to some less, for his presence is felt in vari­ous ways as he vouchsafes, and in this we should live and work, ­doing what it concerns us to do; for without this we should not know how to live. For just as the soul is the life of the body, so Jesus is the life of the soul by his gracious presence; and nevertheless this kind of feeling, however ­g reat, is still only faith compared with what s­ hall come from that same Jesus in the glory of heaven. See, this feeling is for us to desire, since e­ very rational soul should long with all its powers to draw near to Jesus and to become one with him through the feeling of his gracious invisible presence. In this crucial passage Hilton repeatedly speaks of feeling rather than perceiving the presence of Christ, which is taken to be real although invisible, and in comparison with the direct vision of Christ in eternity, this is in the end an experience grounded in faith. Without explic­itly saying as much, Hilton seems to suggest now that the experience of Christ’s presence is a m ­ atter of intuition that may become a ­matter of inward perception or may rather be more 30. ​Hilton, The Scale of Perfection, 2.40–41, pp. 280–85. 31. ​Hilton, The Scale of Perfection, 2.40, p. 283.



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am ­ atter of presupposition. His language suggests a ­g reat deal of fluidity in the manner of experience. The fluidity is expressed in terms of paradox and synaesthesia. One sees the unseeable, the “invisible blessed face” of Christ. By synaesthesia, this sight conveys taste: the soul is “fed with the savor” of that visage. ­Later he conveys the same fluidity in dif­fer­ent terms: “the soul is turned into the eye, sharply beholding the face of Jesus, and is assured that it is Jesus whom it feels and sees.”32 At this point Hilton becomes somewhat more explicit about the dif­fer­ent ways one can experience the presence of Christ, acknowledging that “­every feeling of grace is Jesus and may be called Jesus, and as the grace is more or less, so the soul feels Jesus more or less.” The grace of compunction or contrition for sins “is truly Jesus.” When conversion leads onward to a growth in virtue, that too is an experience of Jesus. One should look for no other Jesus than this; a true lover, firmly confident that the feeling of presence is true, ­will feel and see him ever better.33 Even the attainment of insight into the meaning of scripture involves an experience of Christ’s presence. It was he who expounded the meaning of scripture to the disciples en route to Emmaus, opening their senses to understand its significance, and in the same way “the spiritual presence of Jesus opens the understanding of his lover who burns in desire for him,” giving insight into the scriptures. He is not seen or heard as he is in himself, but rather through his effects.34 Yet eventually he “shows more, leads the soul further inward, and begins to speak more familiarly and more lovingly to a soul.”35 He may appear as a master worthy of awe, as a ­father worthy of reverence, or as a beloved spouse. The soul now “feels it is touching Jesus, and by virtue of that ineffable touch it is made ­whole and constant in itself, rev­er­ent­ly beholding only Jesus, as if nothing existed but Jesus.”36 Further, he may bestow illuminations, displaying “his jewels” to the soul, giving much and promising more, speaking courteously.37 How does Hilton’s notion of experiencing the presence of Christ relate to what we have seen in the nuns of Helfta, Margery Kempe, Dorothea of Montau, or ­others? Most obviously the narrative context is missing, as is the report of specific sayings heard from Christ. Hilton does not tell us that on a par­tic­u­ lar occasion he or anyone ­else was faced with this or that crisis, prayed to Christ, and heard the voice of Christ uttering words of reassurance, leading 32. ​Hilton, The Scale of 33. ​Hilton, The Scale of 34. ​Hilton, The Scale of 35. ​Hilton, The Scale of 36. ​Hilton, The Scale of 37. ​Hilton, The Scale of

Perfection, 2.41, pp. 287–88; 2.42, p. 292. Perfection, 2.42, p. 292. Perfection, 2.43, pp. 293, 296. Perfection, 2.44, p. 297. Perfection, 2.44, p. 297. Perfection, 2.44, p. 298.

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into dialogue. He speaks of inward hearing and vision, but his language points more t­oward intuition than ­toward perception of Christ’s presence, especially when he says that presence can be experienced in the understanding of scripture, or in all creatures. Even if t­ here is a kind of hearing, Hilton does not seem to take an interest in the habit of introlocution—­the pro­cess of constructing the specifics of inward speech and dialogue—­that would lead ­toward the concrete narrative and extended dialogue found in other late medieval writings. Was he suspicious of more dramatic experiences of Christ’s presence, fearing perhaps that they might give food for heresy, or might prove to be delusions, possibly demonic? He certainly was firm in his repudiation of heresy, and he would have known early versions of the Wycliffite heresy before entering the Augustinian canons. Heresy and attachment to carnal plea­sure are for him impediments to correct understanding of scripture.38 But he does not seem concerned that direct experience of Christ would become a source of heresy, and indeed the Wyclifites did not ground their teachings in immediate contact with divine authority, but rather claimed to be giving precisely what Hilton denied they could attain, true exposition of the Bible. When he speaks of experiencing Christ, he shows an arresting lack of concern about ­hazards of delusion. Indeed, he tends to be reassuring on precisely this point. He tells his reader, “If you are a lover of Jesus, trust firmly that your feeling is true, and that by his grace Jesus is in truth felt and seen by you, as you are able to see him ­here.”39 ­Later he says, “The hidden voice of Jesus is altogether true, and it makes a soul true; t­ here is no deceit in it, or fantasy, no pride or hy­poc­risy, but mildness, humility, peace, love and charity, and it is full of life and grace.”40 To be sure, in this latter passage he speaks of the voice of Jesus itself as true and reliable, which is not the same ­thing as declaring all claims to experience of that voice as au­then­tic. Still, his tone is one more of assurance than of caution. He speaks of Christ’s presence mainly as intuited rather than perceived, and when perceived not fleshed out with the apparatus of introlocution, and ­these forms of experience do not seem to raise warning signals for him.

Meister Eckhart Meister Eckhart (ca. 1260–ca. 1328) was born within a few years of Gertrude of Helfta and within a few miles of her birthplace, in the Thuringian village 38. ​Hilton, The Scale of Perfection, 2.43, p. 294. 39. ​Hilton, The Scale of Perfection, 2.42, p. 292. 40. ​Hilton, The Scale of Perfection, 2.44, p. 297.



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of Hochheim.41 He joined the Dominicans at Erfurt, then (following the path of Thomas Aquinas) studied and taught at Cologne and Paris. He is best known for his dense and daring vernacular sermons, but extensive writings in Latin also survive. Shortly a­ fter his death, several teachings culled from his work ­were condemned by Pope John XXII as heretical or doctrinally dangerous. When we turn from Gertrude and the other nuns of Helfta to Eckhart, it seems as though we have passed into a fundamentally dif­fer­ent mystical landscape, and in fact we have. But ­there is a sense, easily missed, in which Eckhart’s mysticism is just as Christ-­centered as Gertrude’s. The themes in Eckhart relevant to us are key motifs in his vernacular sermons, and they are among the points that got him into trou­ble with the inquisitors: the F ­ ather begets the Son within the soul just as in eternity, and the ­Father begets the soul itself, but ­because all God’s activity is ­simple and single, the ­Father begets the individual soul as indistinct from the only-­begotten Son. One of the most provocative statements of this astonishing theme occurs in Eckhart’s German sermon on the text “Justi vivent in aeternum” (The just ­will live eternally): The F ­ ather gives birth to his Son in eternity, equal to himself. “The Word was with God, and God was the Word” ( John 1:1); it was the same in the same nature. Yet I say more: He has given birth to him in my soul. Not only is the soul with him, and he equal with it, but he is in it, and the ­Father gives his Son birth in the soul in the same way as he gives him birth in eternity, and not other­wise. He must do it ­whether he likes it or not. The ­Father gives birth to his Son without ceasing; and I say more: He gives me birth, me, his Son and the same Son. I say more: He gives birth not only to me, his Son, but he gives birth to me as himself and himself as me and to me as his being and nature. In the innermost source, t­here I spring out in the Holy Spirit, where t­here is one life and one being and one work. Every­thing God performs is one; therefore he gives me, his Son, birth without any distinction.42 Similar statements are so common as to be commonplace in Eckhart’s vernacular preaching. Thus, he says the F ­ ather begets the Son within a power in the soul without cessation, the Father gives birth to the Son in the soul’s deepest, innermost ground, indeed God performs all his works so we may be the same only-begotten Son. Furthermore, the one in whom that takes place both 41. ​Bernard McGinn, The Mystical Thought of Meister Eckhart: The Man from Whom God Hid Nothing (New York: Crossroad, 2001); Bernard McGinn, The Harvest of Mysticism in Medieval Germany (1300–1500) (New York: Crossroad, 2005), 94–194. 42. ​Meister Eckhart, The Essential Sermons, Commentaries, Treatises, and Defense, trans. Edmund Colledge and Bernard McGinn (New York: Paulist, 1981), Sermon 6, 187–88.

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becomes the only-begotten Son with no distinction and gives birth to the Son. By transtemporal identity of begetting, what takes place in eternity also takes place within the soul.43 Many recent interpreters have exerted themselves to uphold Eckhart’s essential orthodoxy,44 and he himself thought the inquisitors had misconstrued him. No doubt they did, but Eckhart was a preacher who made few concessions to his congregation. He provoked, deliberately and effectively. What is the difference between Eckhart’s repre­sen­ta­tion of how Christ becomes pre­sent and that of his near con­temporary Gertrude? Superficially, the answer seems clear. For Gertrude it is Christ in his humanity who becomes pre­sent to her soul, the incarnate Christ, a figure of time and history, while for Eckhart it is Christ in his divinity, disincarnate and eternal. But this ­simple accounting does not hold up ­under scrutiny. As we have seen, Gertrude addresses the Christ within her soul as “God,” and Eckhart, who might seem to focus all his attention on the preexistent Word, does at least on occasion identify the Son pre­sent within the soul as the historical figure “Jesus.” Perhaps most importantly, neither Gertrude nor Eckhart is theologically careless enough to fall into what they would have recognized as the Nestorian trap of positing a distinction between the divine and the ­human person. They are the same. The person who comes to Gertrude with all the characteristics of humanity is the same as the person begotten of the F ­ ather in Eckhart’s soul. Nor would it be quite correct to say that the Christ who comes to Gertrude is dif­ fer­ent b­ ecause he comes with the attributes of humanity, ­because the capacity to transcend the bound­aries of time and place is not a h ­ uman attribute. And to say that Eckhart’s Christ is not the incarnate one is to miss an impor­tant dimension of Eckhart’s thought. In a sermon for the Nativity, he says we celebrate within time the eternal birth of the Son from the F ­ ather, that this same birth is accomplished now also in time, in h ­ uman nature, but (citing Augustine) this birth is of no use to us ­unless it occurs also in us. ­There are three births of the Son, but b­ ecause of Eckhart’s provocative insistence on the unity of divine action, he conflates them into a single birth manifested in three ways.45 He thus does not mean to deemphasize the incarnate Christ, but on 43. ​Eckhart, Essential Sermons, Sermon 2, 177–81; Meister Eckhart, Meister Eckhart, Teacher and Preacher, ed. Bernard McGinn, trans. Bernard McGinn, Frank Tobin, and Elvira Borgstädt (New York: Paulist, 1986), Sermons 4, 10, and 12, 247–51 and 261–71. 44. ​Edmund Colledge, “Eckhart’s Orthodoxy Reconsidered,” New Blackfriars 71 (1990): 176–84; Clyde Lee Miller, “Meister Eckhart’s Ironic Orthodoxy,” Acta: Proceedings of the SUNY Regional Conferences in Medieval Studies 4 (1977): 33–43. 45. ​Meister Eckhart, The Complete Mystical Works, trans. and ed. Maurice O’C. Walshe (New York: Herder & Herder, 2009), Sermon 1, 29–38; cf. Eckhart, Meister Eckhart, Teacher and Preacher, Sermon 10, p. 263. Johannes Tauler, Sermons, trans. Maria Shrady (New York: Paulist, 1985), Sermon 1, p­ p. 35–40,



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the contrary to represent the birth within the soul as parallel to the other two births. Eckhart is keenly and emphatically conscious of the incarnation, but of Christ’s incarnation chiefly in us, in our own embodied souls. And yet t­ here surely is a difference between Gertrude’s and Eckhart’s sense of Christ’s presence, and if it cannot be summarized in any of ­these obvious terms perhaps ­there is some other way to formulate it. Eckhart’s mysticism is one centered first on the deity beyond all divine persons, but then also and equally on the persons in their relationship, and in par­tic­u­lar the relationship of birthing between the first and second persons of the Trinity. It is very largely a mystical theology regarding the birth and presence of the second divine person within the soul. But it is not—as Gertrude’s is—­a mysticism in which that divine person manifests personality. Does Eckhart ever show any real interest in the personality of Christ? He does say in one sermon that Jesus speaks within the soul, revealing himself and all that the F ­ ather has spoken in him, the Word of the ­Father; and he cautions that the soul must be alone and ­silent if Jesus is to speak within it. The effect of this revelation is an utter transformation: it drives away all doubt, error, and darkness, bringing to the soul “a pure, clear light, which is God Himself ”; “the soul flows into and out of and over itself, and out over all t­ hings, and back to its first divine source,” bringing “a state of unchanging peace in the ser­vice of God.”46 But the speech in question is a mystical speech; it could never be recorded in any dialogue, and Eckhart nowhere suggests that this speech manifests variability or traces of a history. Even where Eckhart articulates a Christ-­mysticism, he remains apophatic. ­There w ­ ere heirs to Eckhart’s mysticism of the sheerly apophatic person. Few, however, ­were as resolutely Christocentric as Eckhart. Even Eckhart’s disciple Johannes Tauler borrowed this theme only to turn aside from it. He begins his Nativity sermon as Eckhart does, and he correlates the ­triple birth of the Son with the three masses for the feast of the Nativity—­but as his sermon proceeds, it becomes clear that it is God who is born in the soul, not specifically the Son.47 And thus Tauler, ever eclectic and rarely so deep in his theological insight as Eckhart, forfeits all sense that this birth manifests the unity of divine action. He abandons the daring—­nay, dazzling—­notion that the soul is the place where the Son’s eternal begetting takes place. And he opts instead for a more conventional theology of divine presence. At one point he distinguishes three births (in eternity, in time, and in the soul), but Eckhart speaks explic­itly of “this same birth . . . ​now born in time, in ­human nature.” 46. ​Eckhart, Meister Eckhart, Teacher and Preacher, Sermon 1, 239–44. 47. ​Richard Kieckhefer, “The Role of Christ in Tauler’s Spirituality,” Downside Review 96 (1978): 176–91.

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images Christ as a magnet who draws hearts to himself like iron filings, but when he speaks of Christ, as he does frequently, he is mainly concerned with allegorizing or moralizing interpretations of Christ’s earthly life, in par­tic­u­lar the moral value of imitating Christ’s suffering, and less focused on manifestations of Christ’s presence ­here and now.48

Henry Suso and Christ as Eternal Wisdom Of all the figures discussed in this book, the one who was most read in the ­fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was Henry Suso (ca. 1295–1366). A ­ fter entering the Dominican order in his youth, he came ­under the influence of Meister Eckhart. Unlike Eckhart, however, Suso had much to say about his own experience, especially in the quasi-­autobiographical Life of the Servant, and again unlike Eckhart he contributed greatly to the devotional strand in late medieval piety.49 Two sections of The Life of the Servant are of special interest for our purposes. Early in the text, in what we might call a “mystical block,” he speaks of his mystical relationship with Christ as Eternal Wisdom;50 this portion of the work is in thematic continuity with his vernacular treatise Das Büchlein der Ewigen Weisheit (The ­Little Book of Eternal Wisdom) and with the Latin expansion of that treatise, the Horologium sapientiae (Clock of Wisdom), one of the most popu­lar of all late medieval devotional writings. A slightly l­ater portion of The Life of the Servant that holds par­tic­u­lar interest for our theme could be called a “devotional block” of material, distinct from the mystical block that precedes it and from the long ascetic passages that follow.51 The devotional block is the closest Suso comes to portraying his piety in an everyday setting. He tells ­here how when he sat at ­table he invited Christ to eat with him, offering him food and drink as he might any other guest. He drank five portions of liquid in remembrance of Christ’s five wounds. On New Year’s Day he adapted the custom of his native Swabia, where young ­people went about singing and reciting poems in return for bouquets and other pre­ sents; he went to a statue of the Virgin and Child, sang a sequence, and asked the child for a bouquet. On Candlemas he meditated on Mary’s childbirth, followed (in his mind) when she went to the ­Temple, ran ahead of ­others and sang for her, asked the privilege of kissing the child, and entered the T ­ emple 48. ​George H. Tavard,” The Christology of the Mystics,” Theological Studies 42 (1981): 561–79. 49. ​Henry Suso, The Exemplar, with Two German Sermons, trans. Frank Tobin (New York: Paulist, 1989). See McGinn, The Harvest of Mysticism, 195–239. 50. ​Suso, Life of the Servant, in The Exemplar, part 1, from the prologue through chap. 5. 51. ​Suso, Life of the Servant, 1.7–14.



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with the Virgin. For Lent and for May Day he had his personal devotional observances. God admonished him “with an inner voice” to meditate on the Passion, and within his cloister marked off a pro­cessional route meant to replicate the via crucis in Jerusalem.52 In all this he steeped himself in concrete, practical modes of be­hav­ior that served as a framework in which he could picture Christ coming to him or himself ­going to Christ. A l­ater chapter tells how, already when he was a young boy, when he had been bled by a surgeon, he would go “to God on the cross” and raise his wounded arm, ­because it was the custom that a man who bled should go to his beloved and ask a blessing.53 But it is mainly the devotional block that gives us a portrayal of Suso as a young Dominican engaged in serious devotional play, and projecting himself into a relationship with Christ that comes across ­here as imaginary, although elsewhere he depicts it more clearly as real. The habits of piety revealed in the devotional block help to contextualize the bolder, more striking manifestations of Christ’s presence in the mystical material. In the mystical block Suso tells that he had been drawn to the figure of Eternal Wisdom from hearing Proverbs 3:19 (“choose gentle Wisdom as your dear love”) and Ecclesiasticus 24:18–21 read in the cloister. He wondered what she looked like—­and she appeared to him as a strangely alluring yet aloof figure, recalling Boethius’s vision of Lady Philosophy: She was suspended high above him on a throne of clouds. She shone as the morning star, and dazzled as the glittering sun. Her crown was eternity, her attire blessedness, her words sweetness, her embrace the surcease of all desire. She was distant yet near, far above yet low, present yet hidden. She engaged in activities with others, but no one could claim her. Having appeared to him as a maiden, she was transformed into a noble young man; she could be a wise teacher or a lady. She bent down to him and urged him to give her his heart. From that point on he embraced her constantly. Once when he saw a heavenly host he asked one of them to show him what “the hidden dwelling place of God in his soul” looked like; an angel told him to look within himself, where he would see how God caressed his soul, and when he looked he found that his flesh above his heart was clear like crystal, and within his heart he beheld Eternal Wisdom seated peacefully, and God embracing his soul.54 52. ​Suso, Life of the Servant, 1.7, 1.8, 1.10, 1.13, pp. 76–84. 53. ​Suso, Life of the Servant, 21.36, pp. 142. 54. ​Suso, Life of the Servant, 1.3, 1.5, pp. 67–72.

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The ­Little Book of Eternal Wisdom makes two points explicit that had not been quite so clear in The Life of the Servant. First, Eternal Wisdom is straightforwardly identified with Christ, building on the long exegetical tradition that construes Christ as the Wisdom of God. Suso speaks of his uncreated divinity and suffering humanity.55 Alluding to John 16:7, he says he had to be absent in the flesh before his disciples could receive the Spirit.56 Second, Suso now makes explicit the distinction between his experience and his way of expressing that experience. He nowhere denies that he had some kind of revelatory insight, but he acknowledges that he is cloaking it in figurative language. His dialogue with Eternal Wisdom was not actually spoken and heard, and does not comes from “physical conversations” or “responses perceptible through the senses,” but arises from “meditation, in the light of sacred scripture,” presented as it is to make the instruction “more in­ter­est­ing.” The visions he reports ­were not bodily, but “simply allegory.” Nearly all, he says, is “explained symbolically.” He encountered Eternal Wisdom in “spiritual imaginings.”57 Further, The L­ ittle Book of Eternal Wisdom is, unlike The Life of the Servant, expressly didactic: it teaches the need to approach Christ’s divinity through his humanity, the importance of embracing suffering, the constancy of divine love even when it appears as wrath. It is this didactic content, then, that Suso develops at considerable length in his Horologium sapientiae, which consists of extended dialogue between Eternal Wisdom and the Disciple, with neither the autobiographical framing given in The Life of the Servant nor the pointed commentary on experience and its expression found in The ­Little Book of Eternal Wisdom. When we come to Suso ­after reading Gertrude of Helfta, the sister-­books, and other accounts of Christ’s presence, certain f­ actors are con­spic­u­ous by their absence. While Suso situates his encounters with Christ in the context of his life experience, especially in The Life of the Servant, Christ does not specifically address the concerns that arise from Suso’s life. He does not give Suso reassurance or concrete instruction as he so often does in w ­ omen’s sources; angels may at times do that,58 but that is not Christ’s role. He does not experience Christ’s presence in liturgical settings, as ­women writers frequently do. Most fundamentally, he does not convey so strong a sense of Christ as a per55. ​Suso, ­Little Book of Eternal Wisdom, in Exemplar, 1.1, p. 213. 56. ​Suso, ­Little Book of Eternal Wisdom, 1.6, p. 227. 57. ​Suso, ­Little Book of Eternal Wisdom, prologue, p. 208. On this passage see especially McGinn, “Visions and Visualizations,” 236–28, and Barbara Newman, God and the Goddesses: Vision, Poetry, and Belief in the ­Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 12–14, and for fuller discussion of Suso, 206–22. 58. ​Suso, Life of the Servant, 1.15, p. 88.



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sonality, with an ongoing history and distinct moods, in intimate relationship with his own personality. In The Life of the Servant, Eternal Wisdom is alluring and numinous but is not fleshed out as a character. In the dialogues he may speak of his vulnerability on the cross but without displaying that vulnerability. He is an allegorical persona and a magisterial presence, but he does not interact with the circumstances of Suso’s everyday life to nearly the degree that we find in ­women’s sources. At one point Suso’s Horologium sapientiae emphasizes the mysterious nature of Wisdom’s (or Christ’s) presence. She makes herself so secretly pre­sent that only the few who are truly sensitive can perceive that presence. ­Those who wish to discern her presence must begin by examining themselves and recognizing that if they find goodness in themselves she must be its cause.59 Even more than elsewhere, in a passage of this sort Christ is an allegorized person but stripped of the overt characteristics that would qualify him as a personality. Another way to look at Suso is in terms of intuition and perception. With several of the figures we have examined it is pos­si­ble to get some sense of the transition from the one to the other, from the vaguer apprehension of Christ’s presence that comes perhaps in prayer, at moments of anxiety, or in response to specific need, to the report of a voice heard, a form seen. All of the existential turmoil that might have led to an intuition of Christ’s presence is laid out in The Life of the Servant, but the key passages relating to that presence do not come t­ here. Perception arises less clearly out of intuition than for most of the individuals we have discussed.60 Instead, Suso talks about perception of Christ’s presence in a manner that seems at times playful, at other times sublime, yet elsewhere perhaps didactic. We could say that Christophany in Suso’s work is more clearly a literary construct, and it may well be, but short of that we can say more confidently that its grounding in experience is less fully and clearly shown than it is elsewhere.

Conclusion: Christophany and Dominican Piety? Is it a coincidence that the theme of Christ’s mystical presence looms so large in Dominican circles? It is found in the sister-­books that came from the ­houses of Dominican nuns, in Raymond of Capua’s life of Catherine of Siena, and in the lit­er­a­ture from Helfta, where the nuns, while affiliated with the Cistercians, 59. ​Bl. Henry Suso, Wisdom’s Watch upon the Hours, trans. Edmund Colledge, The F ­ athers of the Church, Medieval Continuation, 4, (Washington, DC: Catholic University of Amer­i­ca Press, 1994), 1.8, pp. 142–43. 60. ​But see Suso, The Life of the Servant, 1.5, pp. 71–74, which has already been discussed.

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had Dominicans among their spiritual guides. While the repre­sen­ta­tion of Christ is dif­fer­ent, the theme of mystical presence is echoed in the mystical writings of the Dominican friars. T ­ here is nothing exclusively Dominican about the idea that Christ is pre­sent and can be intuited, even perceived. But several theologically educated Dominicans took on the spiritual direction of religious ­women as their special responsibility, and it is not surprising that this order more than o ­ thers came to explore what it could mean for the mystics’ keenness of spiritual perception to intersect with the everyday lives and liturgical experience of ­women. They would have recognized that for ­those ­women religion was very much bound up with precisely t­ hose concerns, with quotidian affairs and liturgical ser­vice, in the midst of which Christ could always be assumed pre­sent. The involvement of men—­not only Dominican friars but o ­ thers as well— is a reminder that while ­women ­were the subjects, the authors, and the primary audience for much of this lit­er­a­ture, theirs was never simply a ­women’s religious culture. ­Women are most vis­i­ble as subjects and authors, while Dominican friars are most vis­i­ble as promotors and disseminators of the ­women’s culture, not only b­ ecause of their role in care for nuns (and in reforming convents) but b­ ecause they ­were well connected, mobile, and thus in a position to create and maintain networks of influence. At mass they stood in persona Christi and held the body of Christ; in the broader religious culture Christ himself was the male who chiefly entered into w ­ omen’s lives, but ­others stood by, ­eager to lend support and, when pos­si­ble, exert control.

C h a p te r   7

The Inculturation of Christ

The term “inculturation” is used in a missionary context for the means by which Chris­tian­ity is presented to a non-­Christian culture, the ways teaching and worship are adapted to local traditions.1 Inculturation provides an analogy for a pro­cess seen in the repre­sen­ta­tion of Christ. In late medieval sources, some more than ­others, Christ himself is represented as adapting himself to ­human culture, presenting himself in a way that can be understood within a par­tic­u­lar cultural community. From a historical perspective we would normally say that the community inherits and develops a system of symbols, meta­phors, and allegories as a way of talking about Christ: he is a king, a shepherd, a lover, a teacher, and so forth. B ­ ecause we are so accustomed to thinking of religion as expressed in poetic symbols, it is easy to miss what for our subjects would have been taken for granted: that the initiative comes from Christ, who accommodates himself to h ­ uman comprehension by entering into ­human cultural forms. In the context of the gospel narrative he entered into the h ­ uman condition through incarnation; in the ­later history of Christian piety he enters again into the ­human condition through inculturation. Putting ­matters in ­these terms may sound like simply playing along with the fiction implicit in the sources. The crucial point, however, 1. ​Aylward Shorter, ­Toward a Theology of Inculturation (Maryknoll, NY: Maryknoll Press, 1988); Peter Schineller, A Handbook of Inculturation (New York: Paulist, 1990). 225

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is that if Christ is seen as manifesting himself in specific cultural forms, ­those forms are viewed not simply as ways of talking about Christ, but as ways he chooses to make himself pre­sent, ways he wishes his presence to be recognized and understood. To say that the nuns of Helfta or other writers cloak Christ in literary forms is to speak of their agency and their imagination; to say that Christ enters into this or that form is to affirm his agency and his presence. That he does so is a conviction fundamentally impor­tant to our subjects, our sources, and their culture. Even if in the end we adopt a critical stance, we need first to see just how imagination captures a sense of presence. The lit­er­at­ure from Helfta gives particularly in­ter­est­ing examples of this inculturation. The prologue to The Herald of Divine Loving-­Kindness says that Christ sometimes came to Gertrude “in a form more amenable to the imagination, in conformity with the capacity of ­those around her, to whom he preordained that a par­tic­u­lar revelation should be communicated.”2 It is of course pos­si­ble to read this as a conventional admission that Gertrude or her companions exercised their literary imagination in recounting a revelation, and in the literary culture of Helfta that would be a natu­ral ­thing for them to do, but in assigning agency to Christ himself the text asserts his presence, as it would not so clearly do if it acknowledged that the scene was a literary invention. On another reading, this passage could be speaking of the transposition of intuition into the forms of perception, or the use of imagination to realize a presence whose real­ity cannot other­wise be grasped. ­These are all plausible readings, and they all relate to themes developed in this book. Most explic­itly, however, the passage depicts Christ as determining the mode of his manifestation. He is like a character in a play who writes her own lines, the subject of a poem who crafts his own meta­phors. Christ pre­sents himself in a guise in which he is then seen.3 The fondness for imaging Christ as something is of course not new to the nuns of Helfta: to take merely one example, Marie of Oignies sometimes saw Christ as a baby or a small child, but at times also in the form of a dove or a ram with a star on its forehead; just as he manifested himself to his disciples as a pilgrim, and when he sent Saint Thomas to the Indies he took the form of a merchant, so too (according to the life of Marie) he appeared to his friends as a friend.4 But the nuns of Helfta w ­ ere famous for their high standards of Latin learning. 2. ​LDP para. 6 (Barratt, 33–34). 3. ​See Anna Harrison, “Thousands and Thousands of Lovers”: Sense of Community among the Nuns of Helfta (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press/Cistercian Publications, 2022), 70–72. 4. ​James of Vitry, “The Life of Mary of Oignies,” 10.88, in Mary of Oignies: ­Mother of Salvation, ed. Anneke  B. Mulder-­Bakker (Turnhout: Brepols, 2006), 110–11. Christ’s apparition as pilgrim would have been on the road to Emmaus.

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Anna Harrison speaks of their theologically sophisticated, self-­consciously literary culture, shown in revelations that are permeated with textual citations and references to other writings.5 The community at Helfta was particularly effective in its rich deployment of figurative language that goes beyond conventional meta­phor and allegory to convey a sense of presence in revelatory manifestations.6 This way of talking about the presence of Christ was not inevitable, and in other contexts it was not so common: one could simply assert that Christ was pre­sent and spoke, without recognizing his presence as being invested with the poetry of meta­phor. Alternatively, one could picture Christ in an indeterminate form that suggested his presence and his glory without conveying a sense that he was entering clearly into the h ­ uman situation, as when Ignatius of Loyola saw him not in conventional ­human form but as a white body without distinct members or as a round and golden shape.7 More distinctive to Helfta is the fusion of poetry with experience, the tendency to make assertions about Christ as literally pre­sent while couching t­ hose assertions in language that is itself not literal. Yet if the nuns made use of meta­ phor and allegory, that use was based on the premise that meta­phor and allegory captured the ways Christ revealed himself. In the sister-­books Christ appears frequently as a child but can also be the suffering and d­ ying Man of Sorrows. Christian Folini cites a case in which the child Christ prophesies that a ­sister ­will have suffering but he ­will in the end take her to himself in his kingdom; for Folini, this incident shows that Christ in the vision is a child only in outward appearance, and that b­ ehind the child lies the fully grown Son of God.8 This is a pos­si­ble reading of the text, but it might be theologically more accurate and also closer to the sensibilities of the nuns to say that ­behind the manifestation in the form of a child lies the eternal person who can take varying form and remains always the agent who experienced the life of a child and the Passion of an adult. He is the eternally divine person; in what­ever forms he manifests himself and is seen, he remains that divine person. 5. ​Anna Harrison, “ ‘Oh! What Trea­sure Is in This Book?’: Writing, Reading, and Community at the Monastery of Helfta,” Viator 39 (2008): 76, 98. Else Marie Wiberg Pedersen, “Gottesbild—­Frauenbild—­ Selbstbild: Die Theologie Mechthilds von Hackeborn und Gertruds von Helfta,” in “Vor dir steht die leere Schale meiner Sehnsucht”: Die Mystik der Frauen von Helfta, ed. Michael Bangert and Hildegund Keul, 2nd ed. (Leipzig: Benno, 1999), 51, discusses the role of abbess Gertrude of Hackeborn (­sister of Mechthild) in cultivating this emphasis on intellect and theological eduction of nuns. 6. ​Pedersen, “Gottesbild—­Frauenbild—­Selbstbild,” 60–65, speaks of both Mechthild and Gertrude as expressing themselves in imagist (bildreich) poetry and as insisting that knowledge of the invisible must have recourse not just to symbols but to a multiplicity of them. 7. ​St. Ignatius Loyola, The Autobiography, with Related Documents, ed. John C. Olin, trans. Joseph F. O’Callaghan (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), 38–39, 47, 49, and 51. 8. ​Christian Folini, Katharinental und Töss: Zwei mystische Zentren in sozialgeschichtlicher Perspektive (Zürich: Chronos, 2007), 341.

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When Christ manifests himself, then, he is always seen as something, ­ hether the form is conventional or distinctive. Wittgenstein distinguished two w modes of “seeing-as.” He took the Gestalt image of the duck-­rabbit as an example of “aspect-­dawning” or “aspect change,” in which the viewer sees a form one way and then sees it differently. The same image is seen first as a duck, then as a rabbit. That is a special type of “seeing-as.” More common, indeed normal to h ­ uman perception, is the “continuous seeing” of t­hings as something e­ lse. We look up and see a chair, but in ­doing so we are seeing an object as a chair, recognizing it as having a par­tic­u­lar configuration and as adapted to a specific use.9 When Mechthild of Magdeburg saw Christ as a workman or pilgrim, a physician, a friend, a f­ather confessor, a ­brother or ­father, or a bridegroom, or when Mechthild of Hackeborn saw him manifested as a deacon working all ­things along with the priest at the altar,10 did they exemplify “seeing-as” in ­either of Wittgenstein’s senses? ­Because the manifestations are variable—­ because Christ appears in one form and then in another—­one might suppose this is a type of “aspect change.” The analogy of the Gestalt image may further seem apt b­ ecause with that, as with the manifestation of Christ, the form perceived is not literal: the drawing of the duck-­rabbit is not r­ eally e­ ither a duck or a rabbit, and Christ is not literally e­ ither a pilgrim or a deacon. But when Christ is manifested in some form, it is a single form rather than an ambiguous one, even if the forms can alternate: he appears sometimes as a pilgrim, sometimes as a deacon, but not as a pilgrim-­deacon who in the same manifestation could be perceived ­either way. More importantly, the form of manifestation and the meaning b­ ehind it are taken to be intended by Christ, and the postulate of intention is centrally impor­tant. The more typical “seeing-as” that is part of daily experience may also be subject to variation: a child may take a chair and use it playfully as a ­horse; a chair may be seen as not just a chair but also a priceless ­family heirloom or a piece of junk. ­There too, however, one would not be assigning intention to the object. The closer analogy to Christ’s manifestations may be a theatrical one: Christ appears to someone as a pilgrim or a deacon the way an actor might appear as Hamlet in one play, Willy Loman in another. But even if the actor is type-­cast in one or another role, the point of the production is not to say something about the actor but to give an interpretation of the character and the play. A viewer might indeed learn something about the actor’s capabilities, but one would not normally come out of the theater saying, 9. ​Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.  E.  M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1967), 193–229. The example of the chair is not Wittgenstein’s, and my discussion captures only a small part of what he has to say about coming to see-as and continuous seeing-as. 10. ​FLG 1.29, pp. 48–51 (Tobin, 54); 7.11, pp. 554–55 (Tobin, 284–85); 7.13, pp. 556–59 (Tobin, 286); 7.35, pp. 594–95 (Tobin, 303–5); LSG 2.10, pp. 144–45 (Newman, 125–26).

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“Now at last I understand something impor­tant about that actor,” or at least that would not be the usual purpose of the production. When Christ is seen as something, the assumption is that he manifests himself in a par­tic­u­lar form precisely to show something real about his nature and his relationship to his followers. He manifests himself as a physician b­ ecause ­there is a sense in which he actually is pre­sent as a kind of physician. He shows himself as a pilgrim to make clear that he r­eally is pre­sent in the role of pilgrim. The initiative for manifestation is taken to be his, the form of manifestation is not arbitrary but revelatory, and the manifestation is of real if not physical presence.

Meta­phor, Allegory, and Manifestation in the Lit­er­a­ture of Helfta The lit­er­a­ture of Helfta makes abundant use of images or likenesses. The revelations of Mechthild of Hackeborn are filled with tree, animal, and bird images, symbolic gilded and jeweled vestments. At one point in The Book of Special Grace Christ’s Passion is likened to a wedding festival, and elsewhere one is invited to envision playing a symbolic game of dice with Christ. The Herald is at least as lavish in its use of such likenesses. Some of them give expression to the way Christ was manifested; o ­ thers are represented as Christ’s own manner of expression. In ­either case they reveal a monastic culture that delighted in symbolic repre­sen­ta­tion that was taken as adequate to literal presence.11 At the outset of Mechthild of Magdeburg’s Flowing Light of Divinity the reader is confronted with a dazzling, exhilarating, and theologically daring miscellany filled with litanies, allegories, prophecies, homiletic passages. The work is replete with dialogues, not only with Christ but with other figures, including, at several junctures, the Devil. Mechthild tends not to re­spect bound­ aries of genre: allegories, dialogues, visions, and even litanies become mixed and fused. Dialogical meditations sometimes feature allegorical speakers such as Knowledge and Conscience. An allegorical figure may engage Mechthild herself in dialogue, as when Lady Knowledge speaks with Lady Soul, also 11. ​Mary Jeremy Finnegan, The ­Women of Helfta: Scholars and Mystics (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991), 46–54 (on Mechthild of Hackeborn), 82–95 (on Gertrude); ­Sister Mary Jeremy [Finnegan], “ ‘Similitudes’ in the Writing of Saint Gertrude of Helfta,” Mediaeval Studies 19 (1957): 48–54. Finnegan distinguishes similitudes from imaginative visions and from undeveloped comparisons (­simple similes or meta­phors). Roughly two-­thirds of the examples from the Herald come from Book 4. Michael Bangert, “Die sozio-­kulturelle Situation des Klosters St. Maria in Helfta,” in “Vor dir steht die leere Schale meiner Sehnsucht”:Die Mystik der Frauen von Helfta, ed. Michael Bangert and Hildegund Keul, 2nd  ed. (Leipzig: Benno, 1999), 36, comments that passages of this sort disclose Gertrude’s knowledge of gardening and h ­ ouse­hold management.

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known as the Bride. Litanies may resemble closely ­those used in liturgy, but they may fuse with visions, as when the nine choirs of angels sing praise to God, with the faith of Abraham and the longing of the prophets, with the wisdom and piety of the apostles, with the blood and constancy of the martyrs, and so forth.12 Sometimes, to be sure, the language of meta­phor is relatively straightforward and not developed into ­either allegory or assertions of pre­sent manifestation. At one point in the writing of Mechthild of Magdeburg, a dialogue between Mechthild and God takes the form of a double litany. First God praises Mechthild his bride as, among other t­ hings, a light of the world, a crown of virgins, and a salve for the wounded, somewhat as a secular poem in the Carmina burana salutes the beloved as the light of the world and the splendor of virgins. She then praises him, in terms that partially overlap with ­those he uses for her, as “a light in all lights,” a flower, a salve, a pledge, and “an innkeeper in all hostelries.”13 Each of the meta­phors could be the subject of inquiry and analy­sis.14 The meta­phor of light is a familiar one for God. An ephemeral flower is more usually a meta­phor for a mortal creature, but Mechthild may have in mind the Christological interpretation of the flower of the field in the Song of Songs 2:1.15 The dazzling array of unexpected images suggests the equally unpredictable array of attributes that seem particularly applicable to God but is h ­ ere reciprocal, applied as much to Mechthild as to God. Frequently such meta­phors are developed into allegories with multiple related terms of comparison. God is a ­g reat fire, whose sparks are the angels, whose flickerings are the saints, whose coals and embers are the blessed on earth and their bodies, and while smoke is the improper allure of earthly ­things, the radiance of the fire is the sight of the divine countenance that w ­ ill flood body and soul 16 with light. Mechthild often uses personification allegories, as when she pictures a spiritual convent with Love as its abbess, Humility as chaplain, and further virtues playing their roles.17

12. ​FLG 7.17, pp. 560–65 (Tobin, 288–89); 2.19, pp. 104–9 (Tobin, 81–84); 7.19, pp. 568–73 (Tobin, 291); 7.1, pp. 528–29 (Tobin, 273). 13. ​FLG 2.9–10, pp. 98–99 (Tobin, 78); David A. Traill, ed. and trans., Carmina Burana, no. 77 (Si linguis angelicis) (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), 1:318–19. 14. ​Benjamin Keach, Tropologia: A Key to Open Scripture Meta­phors (London: Collingridge, 1856), is a classic if somewhat idiosyncratic compendium of such biblical meta­phors. 15. ​See Paola Schulze-­Belli, “A New Perspective on the Meta­phorical Language of Mechthild von Magdeburg’s Flowing Light of the Godhead: Some Considerations about the Language of the Mystics,” Jahrbuch der Oswald von Wolkenstein-­Gesellschaft 11 (1999): 229–31, on flower symbolism. 16. ​FLG 6.29, pp. 488–91 (Tobin, 254–55). 17. ​FLG 7.48, pp. 622–29 (Tobin, 316–19); 7.36, pp. 598–603 (Tobin, 305–07); cf. 1.44–46, pp. 58–71 (Tobin, 58–65).

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When meta­phor and allegory pass over into manifestation, Christ not only is spoken of as something but pre­sents himself in some form, as if entering into the cultural world of Helfta and participating in its drama by putting on a costume and playing a role, and yet the role is not arbitrary but revelatory. At two points late in the Flowing Light, Christ appears to Mechthild in figurative guises. First she sees him as a poor workman carry­ing a g­ reat burden like the earth. She asks what he is carry­ing, and he says her sufferings. She too should turn to suffering and carry it. She protests that she is so poor that she has nothing. He says that when a person would like to do something but cannot, that is spiritual poverty. She asks him to turn his face ­toward her. He says, “Recognize me within.” She turns within, finds him ­there, and says the burden she bears is too heavy for her, but he helps with the burden. A bit ­later she has a vision of Christ as a pilgrim who looks as if he has been trudging all over. She asks where he has come from, and he says “Jerusalem,” meaning Christendom, but he has been driven from his shelter. She prays for Christendom generally and her convent in par­tic­u­lar.18 The ­later writings from Helfta, The Book of Special Grace associated with Mechthild of Hackeborn and The Herald of Divine Loving-­Kindness written about and partly by Gertrude of Helfta, are more single-­mindedly devoted to Christophany in vari­ous forms, worked out within a richly articulated cultural setting. Mechthild reports visions both on heaven and on earth. When heavenly figures come down to earth, the setting may be liturgical—­the Queen of Glory descends a golden ladder bearing the child in her arms and placing him on the altar—­but more often the movement is from the sublime to the intimate. Christ comes down and touches his heart to hers or rushes into her embrace, drawing her into himself so that she is absorbed in God and lost to herself.19 Like the elder Mechthild, so too the younger one gives extended allegories, but in two somewhat dif­fer­ent forms. Book 1 has allegorical visions abounding in rich color schemes and enumerated points of interpretation. A pro­ cession seen in a vision may feature a banner of white with gold roses and a red banner with silver roses.20 Christ gives Mechthild a ring with seven stones, one recalling his earthly ministry, another standing for the “dance” in which he fell three times to the ground with mighty leaps, the third symbolizing the bridal kiss he received from Judas, and so forth, leading up to the marriage-­ bed of the cross.21 During mass a huge tree appears above the altar, filling the 18. ​FLG 7.11, pp. 554–57 (Tobin, 284–85) (note shift of person); 7.13, pp. 556–59 (Tobin, 286). 19. ​LSG 1.35, p. 115 (Newman, 116–18); 2.20, p. 158; 2.20, pp. 157–58; 2.26, p. 171; 1.9, p. 31 (Newman, 53–54); 2.4, p. 140; cf. 3.10, p. 209. 20. ​LSG 1.27, pp. 95–97. 21. ​LSG 3.1, pp. 195–97 (Newman, 147–49).

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earth and stretching up to heaven, and on its leaves are gold inscriptions referring to Christ’s life.22 In Book 2 the allegory is typically situational, with each ele­ment referring to some aspect of Mechthild’s relationship with Christ, and while ­there may still be visions, the allegory does not rest so fully upon them. One night in Lent she seems to be with the Lord in the desert, and she asks him where he wishes to spend the night. He points to a beautiful but hollow tree, the tree of humility, and says he w ­ ill spend the night t­here. She asks where she can lie, and he invites her to fly to his bosom and rest ­there like a bird, which she does. He reminds her that birds sleep with their heads ­under their wings. She asks what her wings are, and he identifies her desire, her love, and her hope as wings. But if she is allegorically a bird, she is also a fish, swimming in his omnipotence like a fish in ­water.23 ­These meta­phors and allegories are given by Christ h ­ ere without implying that he actually assumes any par­tic­u­lar form, and sometimes it would be difficult to imagine what form he could take to illustrate the language he uses. In this re­spect a manifestation differs from a conventional meta­phor or allegory, although it could be construed as a par­tic­u­lar extension of meta­phorical language when Christ appears as a workman, as a pilgrim, or as a young man. A manifestation is given by its divine source as a kind of revelation, and what is revealed is in the first instance is his presence: as we have seen, Christ does not merely reveal himself, and he does not simply reveal something about himself, but reveals himself pre­sent as something, in a par­tic­u­lar manifestation that fuses presence with insight. This presence is not strictly speaking incarnational or sacramental, but the images used do suggest the capacity of the divine to cross over into the world of creation and to take on a creaturely form. The tendency to encounter Christ not simply in himself but as something is most fully developed in Gertrude. Within the same vision he might be first a vagrant, then a sick man, a lover, and a sailor. Elsewhere he may be a bridegroom, a ­father, or a ­mother. Anticipating a better known passage in the writing of Julian of Norwich,24 Gertrude pre­sents Christ also as a ­mother, albeit one who might seem jealous and clinging and sometimes frightens a child with scarecrows or other terrors to lure him back to herself.25 Gertrude once wished to confess a fault but found no confessor at hand, so she turned to Christ, who declared himself “the high priest and true bishop,” who would 22. ​LSG 1.9 (Newman, 54); see also 1.10 (Newman, 55); 1.13, pp. 61–62; 1.17, pp. 68–69; 1.1 (Newman, 37–38), LSG 1.1 (Newman, 38). 23. ​LSG 2.26, p. 170 (Newman, 134–36); 2.24, pp. 166–67 (Newman, 132–33). 24. ​Julian of Norwich, Showings, trans. Edmund Colledge and James Walsh, Long Text, c. 61 (New York: Paulist, 1978), 300–301. 25. ​LDP 3.63 (Barratt, 177–79); Harrison, “Thousands and Thousands of Lovers,” 115.

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administer to her all the sacraments “more potently than any priest or bishop could do”: he would baptize her with his blood, confirm her with his victory, marry her to himself with the fidelity of his love, consecrate her in holy life, absolve her of all sin, feed her with his love, and pierce her with the unction of devotion to prepare her for eternal life.26 Gertrude’s Herald focuses to an exceptional degree on images and analogies for Christ experienced as pre­sent. The vision of Christ as a vagrant is integrated into the meditative flow of Book 2: throughout the narrative, Christ is addressed in the second person. Gertrude has been angry about something one eve­ning, but early the next morning, before sunrise, she has a chance to pray. As she prays, Christ appears to her as essentially a feeble derelict. (The previous chapter referred to all persons of the Trinity, but ­there can be no doubt that this is now Christ.) She is stung by guilt, realizing that she bears the guilt of her anger from the previous eve­ning, and she wishes he would pass by rather than meeting her at this moment. In response to her unspoken hesitation, he gives an analogy: a sick man who is enjoying the sunny weather and then f­ aces a sudden storm can only hope for a return of fair weather. So too, “I, laid low by my love for you, choose to make my home with you amid all the squalls of your faults, setting my course for the calm of repentance and the harbor of humility.”27 He has been a vagrant, then meta­phor­ically a sick man, then a lover, and fi­nally a sailor. The lesson she learns has to do with divine patience. Given his repre­sen­ta­tion as a vagrant and then his self-­representation as a sick man who cannot get outdoors without the help of ­others, it might have seemed more to the point that she should extend attention to him as a person in need. But he is not ­there to arouse her compassion so much as to show that he is one who makes no claims on her, who is not in a position to enrich or to judge her, but is willing to wait as long as he needs for her to move beyond her anger and return to graceful equanimity. Most characteristic of Gertrude and her sheer intensity is her conception of Christ as a lover. Drawing upon the conventions of bridal mysticism, more indirectly of secular romance, and biblical tradition, she depicts him as a bridegroom, a husband, a loving king to whom she, a queen like Esther, has ready access. As Alexandra Barratt argues, Gertrude used sexual imagery “with a frank exuberance—­even a jouissance—­that stems from an innocent eroticism, unfallen, unrepressed and guilt-­free.”28 When Christ is portrayed in ­these 26. ​LDP 3.60 (Barratt, 174). 27. ​LDP 2.12 (Barratt, 132–33). 28. ​Alexandra Barratt, “ ‘The ­Woman Who Shares the King’s Bed’: The Innocent Eroticism of ­Gertrud the ­Great of Helfta,” in Intersections of Sexuality and the Divine in Medieval Culture: The Word Made Flesh, ed. Susannah Chewning (London: Taylor and Francis, 2005), 107–19. For a parallel case, see

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terms, he not only condescends to enter into the ­human condition and into ­human culture, but eagerly and passionately desires to do so. In one of his most complicated manifestations Christ is a bridegroom but also a kind of gardener. One day Gertrude finds herself dozing off in mass but abruptly wakes and sees Christ holding a tree laden with fruit and with brilliantly glistening leaves. He shakes the tree in heaven, then places it in the garden of her heart, so that she can try to increase its fruit and find rest and refreshment from it. She comes back to herself and is praying for someone who has recently irritated her (a telling if brief gesture t­ oward concrete experience in community), when she recalls a flower at the top of the tree, which bears fruit of good works and flowers of good w ­ ill. At the elevation of the host (which she is conscious of even while enjoying a vision) she sees that she is given a golden robe over the r­ ose colored one she has e­ arlier been given. ­Later in the day, at the office of none (a more perfunctory reference to life in community), Christ appears as a young man and asks her to provide nuts for him, then he lifts her up to a branch of the tree so she can pick them. She asks if it would not be better for him to gather them for her, since she is weak in strength and in gender, but he says no, the bride can deal more confidently with her bashful bridegroom when he visits her at her home. She takes this to refute t­ hose p­ eople who refrain from good deeds, saying if God wanted them he would give the grace needed (an implicit reference to characters she presumably has known). When she has gathered the nuts, he climbs up and joins her, and he tells her to crack them open and offer him the kernels. And he shows her that the nuts with their hard shells are growing on the same tree as apples, ­because love of enemies should be accompanied by relishing the savor of God and being prepared to die for Christ’s sake.29 One might see h ­ ere an extension of themes from the Song of Songs, in which the bridegroom meets his bride amid fruits and flowers, but in Gertrude’s account the garden is not just the setting but integral to the complex moralizing allegory. One visionary experience of Gertrude’s has a dreamlike quality, with abrupt shifts in location and unexpected transformations in her field of vision.30 She is standing in the dormitory and bows to an elder nun as they meet each other, but then she raises her head and sees a comely young man standing beside ­ eonard Patrick Hindsley, The Mystics of Engelthal: Writings from a Medieval Monastery (New York: PalL grave MacMillan, 1998), 173–76. For the tradition of bridal mysticism generally, see Dyan Elliott, The Bride of Christ Goes to Hell: Meta­phor and Embodiment in the Lives of Pious ­Women, 200–1500 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 174–232. 29. ​LDP 3.15 (Barratt, 59–61). 30. ​LDP 2.1 (Barratt, 100–101).

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her. He says her salvation ­will come quickly. She knows she is in the dormitory, but it seems as if she is in her accustomed place in choir. The young man then takes her hand and says if she joins him he ­will make her “drunk with the rushing river of my divine plea­sure.”31 She then sees that they are separated by a high and long hedge with thorns along its top that ­will keep her from crossing to him, almost like barbed wire, but he reaches over, lifts her, and places her next to himself. At that point she recognizes him from the wound in his hand. One cannot say that this is a vision specifically about place, but it is one in which distinct places function as power­ful meta­phors. The chapel is a place in which Gertrude has experienced lukewarm piety, and seeing herself ­there is a reproach for that, but it is a doubly coded location ­because it is where the most sacred activities of the convent take place, and if she becomes true to her own calling, it can become transformed from a place of tedium to one of fervor. The hedge is a barrier so long that she cannot see its ends, although it is growing in an enclosed space; she cannot get over or around it, yet the young man effortlessly lifts her over it in a meta­phor of unearned grace. Age is also centrally impor­tant: Gertrude says she was twenty-­five, and the young man looked as if he w ­ ere around sixteen. Her attraction to him was frankly charged: “His appearance was such as my youth would find pleasing.” A venerable female figure much older than Gertrude is replaced by an attractive male figure nine years younger than she. It is only when he has brought her over to the other side that she sees the wounds in his hands, although he had been holding his hand in hers even before the hedge appeared. One might suppose that this was a­ fter all a dream vision. It does take place in the dormitory. But Gertrude is standing and has a passing encounter with an older nun. If she is dreaming, she dreams about standing in the same place where she is in fact presumably lying down. Elsewhere Gertrude does have dream visions.32 ­Here the experience is not said to be a dream, but it is recounted as a dreamlike vision in which ­things and places and persons undergo inexplicable transformation and—­most importantly—­the possibility occurs that she too may be transformed. An episode from the life of Gertrude that was left out of the standard edition of the Herald is particularly helpful for showing how Christ’s divinity is accommodated to his entry into ­human affairs. When the time comes for her to work in the kitchen, she resents being called away from inward to outward ­matters, but Christ comes to her as an attractive young man, calling her go 31. ​Cf. Psalm 35:9 in the Vulgate. 32. ​LDP 3.32.3 (Barratt, 122).

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with him into the fields (Song of Songs 7:12), so she rises up and goes with him “even in body,” and throughout the day it seems that he is with her as a helper. Emboldened, she asks that he accompany her in her kitchen ser­vice throughout the week, girding himself with his “royal” towel as at the Last Supper ( John 13:4), and he says he w ­ ill gird himself and also gird her, so she may perform her work in u ­ nion with him, to the praise of God the F ­ ather, and he ­will make up for all her failings. She asks how, if he bestows that ­favor on her as she serves, she can restrain herself and keep from the ­favor being revealed outwardly. He reminds her that in his divine omnipotence he is able to contain himself so that he ­will not be perceived more than was appropriate.33 In this case the manifestation is in a form drawn from biblical narrative rather than from freely devised meta­phor, but still Christ appears in specific forms, first that of the lover from the Song of Songs, then that of a servant. She asks him how she can restrain her own reaction; he responds by saying he can regulate his own manifestation, adjusting it to circumstances. Presumably only she is aware of the Christophany, not t­hose around her, but the form of his manifestation w ­ ill have its corollary in the force of her reaction. If he is not too overwhelming, she ­will not be too overwhelmed, and that in itself is reason for his appearing to her in forms familiar within her culture. Christ’s instruction to Gertrude often involves analogies developed into miniature parables that sometimes have ­little clear relevance to the situations she prays over. At times he uses relatively straightforward bodily analogy or analogies with birds. In other cases the analogies are more complicated or compounded: comparisons with a prince who serves the emperor, a bride and bridegroom, ­water that reflects sunlight onto a wall, and a clean mirror that reflects an image effectively are all used in response to Gertrude’s prayer for a single situation. At times the mini-­parables given in response to prayer involve situations from ordinary domestic life. A person close to Christ is like a favored ­daughter who wants to sit near her m ­ other, but who may need to sit in an uncomfortable position. God protects t­hose he looks a­ fter like a m ­ other who warms her child by a fire but shields the child with her hand. T ­ hose who need to be jolted into repentance are like ­people who are brought to scrub their 33. ​Universitätsbibliothek Leipzig, Ms 827, fol. 56r–57r: “Tunc illa, ‘Domine, si tam euidenti dignacione michi seruienti affueris, quomodo me umquam continere potero, quin per exteriorem excessum prodatur?’ Et dominus, ‘Nonne recolis me quandoque intimasse tibi quod hoc potissimum preualet omnipotentia diuina mea, ut quocumque fuero me possim intra memetipsum continere, ne plus senciar, quam congruentissime expediat pro loco pro tempore et pro persona.’ ” On this manuscript see Almuth Märker and Balázs J. Nemes, “Hunc tercium conscripsi cum maximo labore occultandi: Schwester N von Helfta und ihre ‘Sonderausgabe’ des ‘Legatus divinae pietatis’ Gertruds von Helfta in der Leipziger Handschrift Ms 827,” Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur 137, no. 2 (2015): 248–96.

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hands thoroughly when they see one con­spic­uo ­ us stain.34 Often, as in the gospel parables of Jesus, reference is to wealth and luxury items. The body and heart of a man Gertrude prays for are a trea­sure chest in which silver and gold coins are stored. Sharing of merits is compared to the sharing of jewelry. When resignation to the divine ­will prepares the way for consolation, it is like the work of a goldsmith or silversmith, who crafts a masterpiece with sockets for jewels and then must supply the jewels with their specific powers: if a person has made an offering of resignation, Christ is constrained by his goodness to add his consolation.35 Frequently the analogies involve cloth and clothing, items basic to everyday life, needed both for modesty and for warmth, but charged with symbolic meaning as markers of identity and status. T ­ hose who come to the aid of a suffering ­woman ­will share in her reward, just as a piece of cloth that falls into a dyeing vat is colored along with the intended cloth. A ­woman who wished for the merits of virginity but had “incurred some blemish from ­human weakness” may be like a bride in Christ’s embrace, but her robes ­will have clumsy and heavy folds that ­will make the embrace less close. Perhaps most unexpectedly, a person burdened by outward responsibilities that keep her from prayer is like a young ­woman who turns her garment inside-­out and whose ­mother covers her with a second garment so p­ eople do not see what would make the ­daughter a laughing-­stock: so too Christ imposes burdens that cover up what might seem a person’s failings.36 The devotion most famously associated with Helfta, that to the heart of Christ, is again not simply a meta­phor or allegory but a manifestation of presence in specific form. This theme can be found already in Mechthild of Magdeburg, who speaks of the soul as placed within Christ’s heart,37 although she does not dwell on the theme or develop a concrete image of the heart. Mechthild of Hackeborn took over the devotion and developed it significantly further than the elder Mechthild had done. For the younger Mechthild the heart was not simply an object displayed before Christ’s breast, as in modern piety.38 Rather, it was a meta­phor cloaked in further meta­phor, or perhaps rather a layered manifestation. The heart was often a ­house in which she could dwell, or a vessel from which one could drink. Christ could give her his heart-­house, or she could enter into it and find Christ within, perhaps lying on a bed. It might 34. ​LDP 3.72.3 (Barratt, 200); 3.72.5, pp. 200–201; 3.73.1–2, pp. 202–3; 3.75.2–3, pp. 215–16; 3.71.2, p. 198; 3.83.1, p. 229; 3.76, p. 217; cf. 3.18.22, pp. 78–79. 35. ​LDP 3.68.4 (Barratt, 192–93); 3.75.1, pp. 214–15; 3.85, pp. 232–33. 36. ​LDP 3.69 (Barratt, 194–95); 3.86, p. 234; 3.89, pp. 237–38. 37. ​FLG 1.4, pp. 26–29 (Tobin, 43); cf. 1.43, pp. 56-57 (Tobin, 58); 6.24, pp. 482–83 (Tobin, 251–52). See Racha Kirakosian, “Das göttliche Herz im Fließenden Licht der Gottheit Mechthilds von Magdeburg: Eine motivgeschichtliche Verortung,” Euphorion 112 (2017): 257–75. 38. ​Auguste Hamon, Histoire de la dévotion au Sacré Coeur (Paris: Beauchesne, 1923–1939).

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be a round ­house, signifying God’s eternity, with Christ standing in the ­middle. Or the ­house could represent heaven or the place for the sacramental banquet.39 It was a symbol of divine love.40 Mechthild’s own heart could serve as a ­house for Christ. She once said she would gladly give him a gift, and he said nothing would please him more than if she made a ­little ­house in which he could dwell without interruption.41 For Gertrude as for the younger Mechthild, the heart is rarely just a heart. Indeed, for Gertrude the range of possibilities is widened. The heart can be a lamp, or a chalice with reeds for drinking, or a musical instrument.42 Christ’s heart is joined to Gertrude’s heart to make a chalice that is offered to the ­Father.43 Gertrude comments that Christ has given her his heart “in vari­ous ways.”44 The more varied the images, the more the theme of the heart is integrated into other aspects of monastic life and spirituality, relating to the liturgy and sacraments, mystical indwelling of Christ within the soul and the soul in Christ, even the precious metalwork that would have been among the monastery’s most valued possessions. Repre­sen­ta­tion of the divine heart at Helfta further differs from modern versions of the theme b­ ecause it was contextualized by devotion to and recitation of the vari­ous members of Christ’s body. Already Mechthild of Magdeburg spoke of the ­human composite of soul and body as resembling the divine ­union of spirit and flesh, and the points of resemblance culminate with the heart: “­There eye reflects in eye, t­ here spirit flows in spirit, t­ here hand touches hand, t­here mouth speaks to mouth, and ­there heart greets heart.”45 The younger Mechthild was devoted not only to Christ’s heart but to the vari­ ous members of his body, and listing of ­those members showed a tendency 39. ​LSG 2.19, p. 156 (Newman, 131); 2.21, p. 160; 2.27, p. 172 (Newman, 136); 3.1, p. 195; 2.25, p. 167 (Newman, 133–34); 3.41, p. 244 (Newman, 160–61); 2.42, p. 190 (Newman, 146); 3.22, pp. 225– 26 (Newman, 156–57). See Jeffrey F. Hamburger, Nuns as Artists: The Visual Culture of a Medieval Convent (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 151–58. 40. ​Margot Schmidt, “Die Kraft des Herzens: Aspekte einer Anthropologie der Mystik bei Mechthild von Magdeburg und Mechthild von Hackeborn,” in “Vor dir steht die leere Schale meiner Sehnsucht”:Die Mystik der Frauen von Helfta, ed. Michael Bangert and Hildegund Keul, 2nd ed. (Leipzig: Benno, 1999), 128: “The heart of Christ is not only the place of inner experience and expression of bridal mysticism, but a symbol of the love in the origin and salvation of man and of the entire universe. It has cosmic significance.” 41. ​LSG 2.33, p. 178 (Newman, 138–39). 42. ​LDP 3.25.1 (Barratt, 92), and 3.26.1, p. 94; 3.26.2–3, pp. 95–96; 3.30.1, pp. 102–3; 3.53.2, p. 164; 3.26.3, p. 95. Racha Kirakosian, From the Material to the Mystical in Late Medieval Piety: The Vernacular Transmission of Gertrude of Helfta’s Visions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 148–74 (chap. 5, “The Scriptorial Heart”), discusses not only Gertrude’s use of this theme but the ­earlier history and gives a review of recent interpretations. 43. ​LDP 3.30.2 (Barratt, 103–4). 44. ​LDP 3.53.2 (Barratt, 164). 45. ​FLG 4.14, pp. 266–71 (Tobin, 157–58); cf. 1.29, pp. 48–51 (Tobin, 54).

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t­ oward itemizing typical of ­later medieval piety. It was also a way of calling attention to and reinforcing a sense that the body was involved not only in devotion to Christ but in u ­ nion with him. Reference to the heart by itself could easily become conventionally symbolic; itemizing the body’s members made the homology of body and spirit more forceful and pervasive. In one passage Christ places his hands on the hands of Mechthild’s soul, bestowing on her all the works he did in his humanity, then he fixes his eyes on the eyes of her soul and gives her the working of his eyes and the effusion of tears, he grants her ears the working of his ears, he impresses his mouth on the mouth of her soul and gives her the exercise of his mouth, and he unites his heart with the heart of her soul.46 ­Later Christ urges Mechthild, “Look at me, and praise me according to the features of my body.” His head stands for his divinity, his forehead for tranquility, his eyes for the brightness of his divinity, and his ears, nose, nostrils, mouth, chin, and neck all have par­tic­u­lar significance. In his earthly life he prayed on his knees, labored with his hands and arms, worked for ­human salvation with his feet, carried the cross on his shoulders, was flagellated on his back, and suffered in his sides while on the cross. The heart, representing his love and fidelity, is neither left out nor privileged.47 Christ’s body becomes a framework for integrating the diverse aspects of Gertrude’s mystical piety and potentially a mnemonic device as well. Less elaborate but more impor­ tant as an expression of communal devotion is a passage in which Christ’s entire body is a monastery, with his heart as the ­temple, his feet as ambulatory, his hands as workshop, his mouth as chapter ­house, his eyes as classrooms, his ears as place of confession.48 If the Church is the body of Christ, so too is the convent, and the correlation of body parts with spaces implies correlation also with functions in a way that hardly needs stating.

The Inculturation of Christ in Visual Art The lit­er­a­ture from Helfta develops perhaps more fully than any other ­later medieval texts the theme of Christ manifested in forms taken from textual tradition. The ­later German sister-­books tend somewhat more to think of Christ as manifested in visual art. The distinction is not absolute. We have seen how Gertrude of Helfta lay in bed with her crucifix, and another story about Gertrude not included in the standard edition of the Herald tells how she was 46. ​LSG 1.1, pp.  8–9 (Newman, 37–40); cf. 2.34, p.  179 (Newman, 139); 4.13, p.  269; cf. 1.25, pp. 86–87 (Newman, 94–96). 47. ​LSG 3.6, pp. 203–4. 48. ​LDP 3.28 (Barratt, 98).

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praying before a crucifix and saw streams of blood and w ­ ater flow from the side wound, then she heard Christ say she could drink from that wound and, when spiritually advanced, enter in through it.49 Nor are the sister-­books entirely without the sorts of literary culture seen at Helfta. Still, ­there are notable differences in emphasis. This is not b­ ecause the nuns of Helfta w ­ ere educated and their Dominican successors ­were uneducated, but Helfta was exceptional in its highly accomplished Latin learning, while the Dominicans of the sister-­books seem in general to have had more interest in vernacular devotional lit­er­at­ure, and they took keen interest in the devotional statues that proliferated in the late medieval West.50 The Dominican ­sisters ­were particularly fond of miscellanies that could be used for edification and for extraliturgical prayer, including liturgical materials translated for inclusion in such compilations.51 If the sister-­books do not show to the same degree the level of textual culture that flourished at Helfta, they and other sources do display the power of a burgeoning visual culture. The artistic production of late medieval German nuns has been well examined in recent years by Jeffrey Hamburger, Bruno Boerner, and o ­ thers. Long neglected b­ ecause it does not always meet the expectations of “high” culture, this art now claims a place in the era’s largely Christocentric devotion, in which statues and two-­dimensional images alike serve as cult objects, much handled and thus often much worn. Even if they ­were kept in cells or in choir stalls, in princi­ple they ­were owned by the community, which means that they are ex49. ​Universitätsbibliothek Leipzig, Ms 827, fol. 53r: “Vice quadam dum circa terciam orans coram ymagine crucifixi attencius riuulos sacrosancti sanguinis et aque de wlnere lateris ymaginis eiusdem emanentes aspiceret, intellexit sibi dicentem, Ecce quod de corde meo tam efficaci impetuositate fluit tibi propino, si uero deponendo vanam curialitatem tuam te habilitaueris ad introeundum aperturam istam, multo graciora te introrsus inuenisse gaudebis.” 50. ​Gertrud Jaron Lewis, By ­Women, for W ­ omen, about W ­ omen: The Sister-­Books of Fourteenth-­Century Germany (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1996), 266–77; Marie-­Luise Ehrenschwendtner, Die Bildung der Dominikanerinnen in Süddeutschland vom 13. bis 15. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2004), 152–76; Marie-­Luise Ehrenschwendtner, “Puellae litteratae: The Use of the Vernacular in the Dominican Convents of Southern Germany,” in Medieval ­Women in Their Communities ed. Diane Watt (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 49–71; Ehrenschwendtner points to exceptional cases of ­women in the sister-­books who could read, write, translate, and even speak Latin and gives evidence that for the Dominican ­sisters mastery of Latin was largely seen as inappropriate use of time. Still, ­there ­were variations from one h ­ ouse to another; see Hindsley, The Mystics of Engelthal, 15–16, and for a particularly impor­tant nuns’ library, see Antje Willing, Die Bibliothek des Klosters St. Katharina zu Nürnberg: Synoptische Darstellung der Bücherverzeichnisse (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012). See also Racha Kirakosian, From the Material to the Mystical in Late Medieval Piety: The Vernacular Transmission of Gertrude of Helfta’s Visions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 50. No doubt we should be careful not exaggerate the Latinity of priests; ordination was no guarantee of proficiency in Latin. I knew a priest in the early 1960s, the head of Catholic education for his diocese, who began mass with “In nomine Patris, et Filis, et Spiritis Sanctis.” 51. ​Ehrenschwendtner, Die Bildung der Dominikanerinnen, 166–72.

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pressions of communal religion not only b­ ecause the cultural interests w ­ ere shared but b­ ecause the very objects ­were held in common.52 To speak of Christ’s inculturation in visual art is to bring together several themes touched upon at vari­ous junctures in this book: the ubiquitously pre­ sent Christ was made concretely manifest in the crucifix, in images where he lay in the arms or lap of his ­mother, and other works of three-­dimensional art, but ­these works ­were also foci for prayer and means for realized imagination, and b­ ecause the statues w ­ ere cult images that fixed scenes from sacred narrative, they also involved projection of historical events into the late medieval pre­sent. Inculturation, prayer practices, devotional imagination, and the flexibility of sacred time are thus all linked. Three stories, two from Katharinental and one from Unterlinden, give vivid testimony to the sense that an image could manifest the living presence of sacred personages. When a s­ister of Katharinental went before an image of Mary with Christ in her arms, she took the child’s foot in her hand with g­ reat devotion, and it turned into flesh and blood in her hand. Another nun was distressed about her ­brother, so she went before an image of the Virgin and Child for prayer. The child offered her his foot, which she took in her hand, and it became flesh and blood, then the child took its foot back to itself. She prayed to the Virgin, as one would u ­ nder any circumstances before her image, to give her consolation, and Mary assured her that her prayer would be heard. More dramatic is the story of one ­sister at Unterlinden, who was once standing in the choir before an image of the Virgin and Child, imploring the Virgin to ask her Son for her salvation, when suddenly with her bodily eyes she saw the child extend his hand to her as a pledge of his ­favor. She grasped his hand, and it came loose from the image and could not be reattached.53 Statues were fixed, as if timeless, but devotion to them was complemented by reminders of the precise times at which events from the life of Christ occurred and were projected into the present on the relevant liturgical occasions. On Christmas Eve, a nun of Katharinental awoke and saw that her bed was enveloped in bright light, indicating that this was the hour when God was born into the world. Another was praying a­ fter vespers on Friday, and a voice told her this was the time Christ was taken down from the cross, with his wounds all open. 52. ​Hamburger, Nuns as Artists; Bruno Boerner, “Le rôle de l’image sculptée dans les couvents féminins allemands de la fin du Moyen Âge,” Bibliothèque de l’École des Chartes 162 (2004): 119–31. Robert Heinrich Oehninger, Wir hatten eine selige schwester: 33 Lebensberichte über Dominikanerinnen aus dem Kloster zu Töss bei Winterthur, nach dem mittelhochdeutschen Text von Elsbeth Stagel (1300–1360) (Zürich: Werd Verlag, 2003), a companion volume to Oehninger’s edition and translation of the sister-­book, reproduces figural initials alongside the relevant entries. 53. ​SB Katharinental, 107 and 139–40 (see also 133); SB Unterlinden, 414. Boerner, “Le rôle de l’image sculptée,” discusses Katharinental, 123–29.

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Yet another heard a voice on Easter night say, “Rise up! It is now the hour when Our Lord arose from the dead!” She then awoke e­ very night at that same time.54 The fixity of statues was complemented also by manifestation of Christ as he looked at par­tic­u­lar ages, seeming to be pre­sent by projection from his historical life into a l­ater time. He appeared to Anne of Ramschwag at Katharinental as when he was seven years old, with golden hair and bearing beautiful flowers.55 Gertrude of Helfta had a visionary encounter with Christ as a young man but also as the Crucified, and more than once she interacted with the child Christ.56 The point, or at least a point, is that Christ is f­ree to manifest himself at any age, in any form. The images that stimulated this consciousness of the presence of Christus patiens ­were usually but not always crucifixes. The monastery of Katharinental was known for having a large collection of artworks, including statues commissioned for the new altars consecrated in the chancel in 1305. One of ­these altars was dedicated to Saint John the Evangelist, and the statue of its patron was so striking that a chronicle reports “every­one marveled at it, even the master himself.”57 The ­sisters of Katharinental are shown in their sister-­book as praying before images more often than ­those of other convents.58 In that book the nuns’ experience of Christ’s presence more often than not took the form of locutions: the visual ele­ment is often supplied by the devotional aids rather than by entry of the seen from a world normally unseen. One nun of Katharinental prayed before an image of Christ at the pillar, asking him to give her all the pain and sorrow he felt in his flagellation, a wish that he granted. Another ­sister went before an image that showed Mary Magdalene at the feet of Christ, asking him to forgive her sins as fully as he forgave the Magdalene’s, and she heard a voice assuring her that her sins ­were all forgiven. Yet another prayed before an image of Christ’s burial, took his hands and feet in her own hand, and found them turned to flesh and blood.59 Particularly when such experience came in the context of a panel painting, which would often depict multiple figures, the voice that spoke was not necessarily that of Christ: Elsbeth of Stoffeln was once greatly disturbed when she felt she was unappreciated in her office as 54. ​SB Katharinental, 126, 129–30, 139. 55. ​SB Katharinental, 130. 56. ​LDP 2.1.2 (Barratt, 101), 2.5.2 (Barratt, 113), 2.6.2 (Barratt, 117). 57. ​Christian Folini, Katharinental und Töss: Zwei mystische Zentren in sozialgeschichtlicher Perspektive (Zürich: Chronos, 2007), 116, 341–43; Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 414. Günther Wolf and Detlef Zink, eds., 750 Jahre Dominikanerinnenkloster Adelhausen, Freiburg im Breisgau (Freiburg i.Br.: Adelhausenstiftung, 1985). 58. ​E.g., SB Katharinental, 123, 132. 59. ​SB Katharinental, 111, 123, 133, 130 (Saint John resting on Christ’s chest), 117–18 (Virgin).

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steward. She looked at a panel on which the crucifixion was painted, with Mary at the foot of the cross, and Mary spoke to her, asking, “Do you wish for reward from ­people? My child and I ­will be your eternal reward!”60 Even at Katharinental, with its multiplicity of repre­sen­ta­tions, it was by the crucifix that presence was most frequently manifested. Repeatedly the nuns hear a voice from the crucifix, granting requests, reminding them of the need to suffer, assuring them that their sins are forgiven and they w ­ ill be saved, giv61 ing counsel to be passed along to someone e­ lse. On occasion ­there is a dramatic ele­ment to the encounter, as when Christ stretches his right arm down from the cross and lays his hand on a s­ ister’s head,62 but usually it is a voice from the crucifix that manifests presence. When Hilti Brümsin of Katharinental was once in prayer, Christ recalled for her a series of “sights.” The first was when he was on the cross and the Jews mocked him. Then he recalled the love with which he departed from his ­Father’s heart and the obedience that he upheld. He said she should recall his steadfastness and how he looked at the thief and then his m ­ other on the cross, then the other ­things he saw from the cross.63 This is a clear example of taking “still shots” out of the context of a narrative; the narrative itself is presupposed, and the detached moments are held up as encapsulations of that narrative, somewhat as the crucifix and the Pietà always encapsulate phases from the narrative of the Passion, or the Virgin and child turns the Adoration of the Magi into the adoration of the viewer. Unusual h ­ ere is the emphasis on what Christ himself saw as he hung on the cross: the s­ister’s seeing is complemented by Christ’s, in a version of what Hinduism calls darshan, reciprocal seeing and being seen,64 and she is meant to take both sides of this beholding into her own meditation. The wounds of Christ, which famously became as it w ­ ere fetishized in late medieval piety, w ­ ere especially impor­tant in the Katharinental sister-­book. A ­sister saw Christ standing before her with his five wounds or was allowed to suck from his wounds.65 Elsbeth Hainburgin saw Christ with a gold crown on his head, but without his five wounds. He explained the unexpected circumstance, saying he wished to shed his Passion upon her and impress the five wounds so deeply in her that she would feel them in herself. She told another 60. ​SB Katharinental, 119; cf. SB Töss, 38 (vision of Christ modeled on the Veronica). 61. ​SB Katharinental. 98, 102, 105, 114–16, 122, 136, 138–40. 62. ​SB Katharinental, 115. 63. ​SB Katharinental, 112. 64. ​Rosemary Goring, ed., Larousse Dictionary of Beliefs and Religions (Edinburgh: Larousse, 1994), 131. 65. ​SB Katharinental, 102, 111–12.

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s­ ister that in her prayer she often experienced the crown of thorns spiritually placed on her head, and the nails piercing her hands and feet.66 The stigmata are usually represented as physical and vis­ib­ le; in this account the gap between such extraordinary piety and more ordinary devout experience is bridged by a kind of spiritualized stigmatization that approaches the invisible (though physically painful) stigmatization of Catherine of Siena more than the vis­i­ble (though painless) bestowal of the wounds on Francis of Assisi. Prayer before a crucifix and the coming-­alive of the devotional aid w ­ ere specialties also among the nuns of Töss.67 The most extended and elaborate manifestation of this trend is in the account of Mechthilt of Stans. One night ­after matins, she beheld a troop of “lords” coming into the monastery, one of whom bore a large cross that was brighter than a crystal. The one with the cross told her she should not be afraid but should come with him. All the lords then pro­cessed into the choir, chanting as they would for the liturgy of Good Friday. One of the lords went up to the altar and raised the cross up high, while the ­others chanted and knelt before the cross, again following the liturgy of Good Friday. Mechthilt was filled with ­great won­der at all this. Then she looked up and saw that Christ himself came from heaven and lay on the cross, with all his wounds. He looked at her lovingly and spoke graciously to her, asking if she believed he was true God and man. She affirmed that she did. He beckoned her come closer, and asked if she sought any comfort other than him. She did not. He then said he would comfort her with his holy body, blood, soul, and divinity, giving her all the consolation he gave his apostles on Holy Thursday—­and, by implication, giving himself as he does to anyone receiving him in communion—­and assuring her that she would never lack his comfort. When she encountered affliction, she should turn inward into her heart and would find him with all consolation and joy. If she only turned away from this world, heaven would be hers, and he gave her his eternal blessing. Then he returned to heaven, taking her heart and her senses with him. She was so deeply affected by his presence that it was not enough for her that her soul and mind overflowed with the sweetness of his divinity: she yearned also to have bodily experience of his five wounds, his “marks of love.”68 At Töss as at Katharinental, images other than the crucifix could serve a stimulus to visions and locutions.69 Anna Wansaseller of Töss often prayed be66. ​SB Katharinental, 127. 67. ​SB Töss, 24, 88–89; cf. SB Adelhausen, 161, 174–75, 184, 185. 68. ​SB Töss, 63–64. The consolation on Holy Thursday would be that of John 14:1, 3, 14, 15:9–11, and so on. 69. ​SB Töss, 24–25, 27.

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fore an image of Christ’s face that hung outside the chapter h ­ ouse, and she offered a prayer of greeting that was inscribed with the image. When she came to the verse “I greet you a thousand times over,” she bowed her head devoutly. On one such occasion Christ spoke back to her, saying she should ask him to forgive her sins and allow her to share his torments and commend to her his ­mother and Saint John as he commended them to each other, and that he himself might come to her at her end.70 Presence was activated h ­ ere by salutation. The child Christ could also be manifested in an image. One of the most familiar of all images was the statue of the Virgin holding the child in her arms; its proliferation helps to explain why ­mother and child together break through from eternity into time, as that would other­wise be a prerogative of divinity. But in late medieval devotion the child was not always with his m ­ other. Margaret Ebner had an image of the infant who lay in a crib but could be picked up and held; she dreamed once (actually she speaks of a nighttime revelation) that the child was playing exuberantly in the crib, and she had to ask him to be quiet so she could sleep, but he said he did not want her to sleep but to pick him up and hold him.71 One might expect a baby to need tending, but he was also capable even in childhood of being a comforter. One novice at Unterlinden had a fever and needed a drink of w ­ ater, which no one was on hand to bring. She wept, and suddenly Christ was with her in the form of a beautiful child. He touched her lips, stroked her face, and consoled her through the night with childlike gestures, taking her fever and her thirst from her with his gracious presence. Not recognizing him, she asked how he was able to enter the monastery. His reply was surely not one she would have anticipated: although he was g­ reat and sublime, he had become h ­ umble and small on earth for her sake.72 Perhaps the fullest range of modes is in the vita of Lukardis of Oberweimar, who encountered Christ as a child who ran about, played, brought her refreshment, carried her cloak, and shared with her a loving gaze; more rarely, she saw him as a child in his m ­ other’s arms.73 It is not always clear that experience with the child Christ was directly linked with the culture of images. But even if the connection is only indirect, it seems likely that the proliferation of statues played a role in stimulating a sense that Christ could be manifested in ­these two roles. If the crucifix showed him fixed 70. ​SB Töss, 46–47. 71. ​ME pp. 87–93 (Hindsley, pp. 132–35). 72. ​SB Unterlinden, 467–68. 73. ​VLSW c. 27, p. 323; c. 39, p. 332; c. 40, pp. 332–33; c. 41, p. 333; c. 43, pp. 333–34; c. 44, p. 334; c. 16, pp. 218–19; c. 46, p. 335.

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to the cross, the image of the Virgin and Child allowed him greater liberty to clamber down from his ­mother’s lap or arms and to mingle in the social world of the monastery. Experience of Christ linked with devotional imagery and Christophany in the context of liturgy tend to go hand in hand, and in both cases the Nativity and the Passion figure prominently. An interesting contrast is found in the life of Lukardis of Oberweimar, who, despite some signs of influence from nearby Helfta, seems not to have been inspired to her experience of Christ either by liturgy or by iconography, and when her vita does focus on the liturgical calendar, it is neither the Nativity nor the Passion but Easter that claims priority. One Easter, the voice of Christ came to her, “Rise up, my beloved, praise, bless, and adore the omnipotence of my splendor, for this is the hour at which, having conquered death, I arose from the dead.”74 And one Easter Monday Christ came to her as a lovely young man, bearing his wounds, passing through a closed door, and he sat on a chair beside her bed. He noted that in John’s gospel he entered in to his disciples through closed doors and breathed on them, saying they should receive the Holy Spirit. He wished to do the same for her. He placed his mouth on hers and breathed into it, then dis­appeared, leaving her with sweetness that made her feel inebriated.75 In its own way, the vita shows the inculturation of Christ, but this is a mode not widely shared.

Sickness and Death as Occasions for Presence in the Lit­er­a­ture of Helfta It is not the Grim Reaper or the Angel of Death but Christ himself who comes to the s­ isters at their departing, and h ­ ere too he comes in more than one mode. The infirm and the ­dying can seem to withdraw into loneliness as they pass into solitude, as they drift away from the world of the living, their faculties waning, their inner life cut off from the life around them. Often that image is a real­ity; the sick and the ­dying are sometimes abandoned. Even when they are accompanied, the hour of death is a time of passing, and it seems inevitably to be a passing away from com­pany, a severing of social ties. L ­ ater medieval religious lit­er­a­ture acknowledged this passage into solitude but at the same time presented an alternative view of the deathbed scene.76 Occasionally the 74. ​VLSW c. 33, pp. 326–27. 75. ​VLSW c. 28, p. 324. 76. ​Harrison, “Thousands and Thousands of Lovers,” 143, also draws this contrast.

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scene is described with a particularity that is not formulaic,77 but on the ­whole the topoi are well established and the accounts tend to rely on them heavi­ly.78 In the lit­er­at­ure from Helfta, the sister-­books, and related texts, ­dying was the occasion for the gathering of two communities, one representing the Church militant on Earth, the other the Church triumphant in Heaven. Members of the religious community might crowd about one’s cell or one’s bed in the infirmary, while that same space was thronged also by saints, angels, and not least importantly Christ. An event that might seem starkly individual was asserted to be social. The scene might be modeled in part on the legend of the Virgin Mary’s death, when she was surrounded by Christ and all his apostles, summoned miraculously from the regions to which they had dispersed.79 In one case, as we ­shall see, this allusion becomes explicit. As her divine Son received her soul then, so now (the sources devoutly urge) he and his retinue would receive the soul of a d­ ying ­sister. Throughout life, the d­ ying person might have prayed regularly to the Virgin for her intercession, nunc et in hora mortis nostrae, and now she might be included in the heavenly embassy. The members of the community gathered in solidarity at the deathbed might not be able to perceive the community on the other side waiting to receive the soul, but in some cases a member of that community might indeed sense or perceive what was happening on the spiritual plane, and might narrate to ­others what took place as the soul was making its passage. Wolfgang Beutin has examined the repre­sen­ta­tion of death in the lit­er­a­ ture from Helfta as witness to the common ­human anxiety in the face of death and judgment. The ­women of Helfta had all the resources of the monastic and sacramental lives to guide them ­toward salvation, but death and judgment ­were nonetheless inevitably fearful and called for reassurance. The comforting voice of Christ, the assembly of Christ and the saints at the deathbed, and the assimilation of mors mystica to unio mystica all answered to this need.80 From this perspective ­there is continuity in the repre­sen­ta­tion of terminal illness, death, and posthumous visions of the soul in glory. Revelations at ­every 77. ​John Van Engen, “Communal Life: The Sister-­Books,” in Medieval Holy ­Women in the Christian Tradition, c. 1100–­c. 1500, ed. Alastair Minnis and Rosalynn Voaden (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010), 116, tells the story of a stern ­sister who laughed about her own passing before slipping away ­gently. 78. ​Lewis, By ­Women, for ­Women, about ­Women, 246–47. 79. ​Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints, trans. William Granger Ryan, (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1993), 2:89–91. 80. ​Wolfgang Beutin, “ ‘Ego semper vivere vellem in his poenis . . .’—­der Tod der Mystikerin,” in Europäische Mystik vom Hochmittelalter zum Barock: Eine Schlüsselepoche in der europäischen Mentalitäts-­, Spiritualitäts-­, und Individuationsentwicklung, ed. Wolfgang Beutin and Thomas Bütow (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1998), 189–219. On the deaths of saints see also Robert Bartlett, Why Can the Dead Do Such ­Great T ­ hings?: Saints and Worshippers from the Martyrs to the Reformation (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2013), 529–35.

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stage all ratify the message of salvation for a par­tic­u­lar individual and the hope of salvation for o ­ thers. All of this is true to the sources that Beutin examines. For our purposes, however, ­there is an ele­ment of discontinuity: the role of Christ changes dramatically. In the course of the terminal illness he is a mysterious presence, operative ­behind the scenes, accessible only to a visionary. At the moment of death he comes specifically as the bridegroom to receive his spouse into bliss. And in visions ­after death he is a king enthroned and a judge, like “the king” in the scene of Last Judgment (Matthew 25). In the lit­er­at­ ure of Helfta, in the revelations of Margaret Ebner, in the vitae of Dorothea of Montau, and in many other settings the ­women who enjoy mystical ­favor also suffer debilitating illness, and patient endurance of suffering is something Christ requires of them as a means of satisfaction for sins, as a discipline that heightens virtue, and at least implicitly also as an exercise in the “passive” submission to Christ that is integral to mystical life.81 The Book of Special Grace portrays Mechthild of Hackeborn as a paragon of such endurance, subject as she was to headaches, insomnia, and general debilitation that kept her in par­tic­u­lar away from the liturgy. To comfort her, Christ lay beside her in bed, embracing her with his left arm, and saying this arm was the one closer to his heart.82 Late medieval fascination with suffering came to a culmination, however, in accounts not just of sickness but of terminal illness. In The Herald of Divine Loving-­Kindness the scene of d­ ying is largely devoted to question and answer, in which Gertrude becomes the medium of communication explaining Christ’s intentions to the d­ ying s­ ister and to the community. Would the d­ ying w ­ oman be held accountable for her disability? Should she resign her office? Was she in danger of receiving communion unworthily? W ­ ere t­ hose attending her wasting their time? Why was a d­ ying ­woman’s departure being delayed? If a d­ ying s­ ister lost her capacity for speech or could only call out “My spirit!” or “Good Jesus, good Jesus!,” what did that mean? Was it time to administer the last rites? On all such questions it was Gertrude who could see ­behind the veil and convey to the ­dying w ­ oman or the community the ­will of Christ, who spoke to her—­that is, 81. ​See, e.g., Lewis, By ­Women, for ­Women, about ­Women, 242–45; and Richard Kieckhefer, Unquiet Souls: Fourteenth-­Century Saints and Their Religious Milieu (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 50–51, 71–75. 82. ​LSG 2.32, p. 177; LSG 2.25, pp. 167–68 (Newman, 133–34); LSG 2.27, p. 172 (Newman, 136); LSG 2.30–32, p. 175 (Newman, 137–38); LSG 3.19, p. 221 (Newman, 155–56); LSG 4.58, p. 309. Cf. LSG 2.22, p. 161; LSG 2.31–32, pp. 176–77 (Newman. pp. 137–38); LSG 3.10, p. 209 (Newman, 151–52); LSG 3.20, pp. 222–23; LSG 3.31, p. 235; LSG 3.34, pp. 238–39 (Newman, 158–59); LSG 3.36, p. 240; LSG 3.45, p. 248 (Newman, 161–62); LSG 4.9, pp. 266–67. See also LDP 4.13.1 (Barratt, 77); 4.14.1, p.  81; 4.14.7, p.  85; 4.16.7, p.  85; 4.17.1, p.  99; 4.25.4, p.  120; 4.38.5, p.  184; 4.48.1, p.  213; 4.48.9, pp. 291–20; 4.48.14, p. 225; 4.48.16, p. 228; 4.55, pp. 275–76; 4.59.3, p. 289.

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he spoke but evidently did not appear, and thus did not take on a par­tic­u­lar culturally prescribed form.83 Christ allowed one ­sister to be terrified by a vision of a demon as a purgation that would redound to her merit in eternal life. Gertrude asked Christ where he himself had been during that trial, somewhat as Anthony asked where Christ had been through his own demonic assault. He replied, “I hid myself at her left side, but as soon as she was purged I presented myself to her and took her with me into eternal rest and glory.”84 While the approach of death could bring detachment from the world and from society, this could be construed in positive terms as a heightening of inwardness. One ­dying ­sister was cut off from ­human affairs and could not be consoled by h ­ uman means, but Christ explained that he himself now had privacy within her.85 The social circle was narrowed to the ­dying ­woman, Christ, and Gertrude as mediator. The interpretation placed on the w ­ oman’s condition cannot be understood as a general statement about disability but has to be taken in the specific context of imminent death, for which intimacy with Christ was direct preparation. When the time of death arrives, the veil is pulled back, and the texts tell far more about spiritual presence and its manifestation in culturally specific terms. The death of Christ’s bride was itself a marriage. Death was ecstasy. It was entry into the bridal chamber, or into the wine cellar, accompanied by Christ the bridegroom. ­These conventions ­were widespread, known in southern as well as northern Eu­rope.86 In the Helfta lit­er­a­ture the theme is fully developed, with the experience of the ­dying person fully transparent to the living visionary ­sister. Up to this point Christ has been manifested chiefly in locution; now he comes more often in vision and in the par­tic­u­lar form of the bridegroom. When the time comes for the bridegroom to receive one s­ ister into the bridal chamber, Gertrude hears the words spoken to the ­dying w ­ oman, “Behold, now at last I take you to myself with a kiss of power­f ul sweetness, 83. ​LDP 1.5.4 (Barratt, 22–23); 1.5.7–11, pp. 24–31; 1.5.13–17, pp. 32–37; 5.4.1–11, pp. 78–93; 5.6.1, pp. 116–19. 84. ​LDP 5.2.2 (Barratt, 30); see also 5.6.1, pp. 116–19 (Barratt, 57–58); 5.6.2, pp. 118–21 (Barratt, 58). Lukardis of Oberweimar, a slightly younger con­temporary of Gertrude of Helfta, also asked questions of Christ: Why she was suddenly released from pain, what did it mean that she sensed the fragrance of fine wine at communion, why was a person allowed to experience g­ reat distress, what did Christ want her to learn from a vision (VLSW c. 34, pp. 327–28; c. 45, pp. 334–35; c. 47, pp. 335–36; c. 56, pp. 341–42; cf. c. 63, p. 347). 85. ​LDP 5.7.1, pp. 122–25 (Barratt, 61). 86. ​­Sister Bartolomea Riccoboni, Life and Death in a Venetian Convent: The Chronicle and Necrology of Corpus Domini, 1395–1436, ed. and trans. Daniel Bornstein (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000): the d­ ying nuns render their souls to Christ their spouse (64, 65, 67, 68, 70, 71, 72, 75, 100), or more simply to their spouse (82 and 97), or render themselves to God (75–76, 78), sometimes ­after seeing him in a vision and receiving consolation from him (64, 65, 67, 69–70, 81).

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and with the closest embrace of my divine heart I s­ hall pre­sent you to the Lord God, my heavenly ­Father.” Like a tiny droplet, she returns in bliss to that abyss from which she originally flowed. The medium ­here is still Gertrude, but now she reports what she sees, rather than what she hears in question and answer. In another case Christ comes to his bride, and in flowering splendor he leads her to the bridal chamber, bids her, “Arise, make haste, my beloved, and come” (Song of Songs 2:10), kisses his bride, and introduces her into his wine cellar. It is a wedding, and t­ here are guests, but the inevitable transition is from the social event to the privacy of the marriage chamber.87 Gertrude foresaw her own death in a vision that Christ bestowed on her: a multitude of angels and saints would come to her, and Jesus himself, her king and virginal bridegroom, would come decked with flowers, lean over as if to kiss her, and draw her entire soul into himself by his divine power.88 When a s­ ister seemed to be breathing her last, the convent gathered about her, perhaps summoned by a clapper,89 and Christ in the form of the bridegroom appeared and spoke to the ­dying ­woman’s soul, telling her he would exalt her among ­those near her,90 meaning in the presence of her community. Christ sprinkled all ­those pre­sent with the dew of his blessing, saying it pleased him that all members of this beloved community should be pre­sent at this transfiguration, and should have honor in heaven before all the saints, just as Peter, James, and John ­were specially honored among his apostles by their presence at his Transfiguration on the mountain. Having received this blessing, the ­sisters returned to choir to complete matins.91 If the deathbed scene came at times to resemble that of the Virgin’s dormition, the resemblance on one occasion became explicit. The w ­ hole congregation was in prayer for one ­dying s­ ister, and Gertrude asked Christ to consider the ­woman like his own m ­ other and show her something of the affection he showed his ­mother at her death.92 By way of comparison, the book of Margery Kempe tells of death in terms reminiscent of the narratives from Helfta, although without the explic­itly bridal ele­ment. Christ assured Kempe that at her death he would come for her with the Virgin and saints and angels. Absorbed in his Passion rather than her own suffering, she would feel no pain at her parting. She would have no fear 87. ​LDP 5.4.1–11, pp.  78–93 (Barratt, 37–44); 5.4.17–18, pp.  100–103 (Barratt, 48–48); 5.7.5, pp. 126–29 (Barratt, 63–64). 88. ​LDP 5.32.1–8, pp. 256–65 (Barratt, 143–47). 89. ​Cf. S­ ister Bartolomea Riccoboni, Life and Death in a Venetian Convent, 71, 73. 90. ​Cf. Sirach 15:4. 91. ​LDP 5.4.12–14, pp.  94–99 (Barratt, 45–46). The death of Lukardis of Oberweimar is recounted in terms suggesting familiarity with the Helfta lit­er­a­ture (VLSW c. 96, pp. 365–66). 92. ​LDP 5.1.21 (Baratt, 17).

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of the Dev­il: “He fears you more than you do him.” She would have no purgatory other than that on earth. The hands that w ­ ere nailed to the cross would receive her soul. He and his ­mother would take her by the hand, and they would dance with the virgins. Anyone on earth who asked a ­favor of her, believing God loved her, would receive the request or some better f­ avor.93 If she had enjoyed a posthumous cult, t­hese promises would have been power­ful incentives to ask her intercession for miracles and other ­favors. In the Adelhausen sister-­book, too, death has a mystical quality but without the theme of Christ as the bridegroom that figures so prominently in the lit­er­at­ ure of Helfta. Some of the ­sisters experienced a kind of mystical ­union and became luminous and transparent as crystal just before their deaths. Shortly before Ite of Nellenburg died, she had herself taken into the choir and had an antiphon sung. She said she might die from the excess of sweetness she was experiencing, then she went on to say, “All that is in me is God, and between him and me t­here is nothing but the body.” When Adelheit of Wendlingen lay on her deathbed, she beheld a ­g reat wondrous light in which Christ appeared and sat before her, assuring her of eternal life, and urged her to receive communion.94 Christ could always be manifested in richly articulated form that might be very much specific to a par­tic­u­lar community. The revelations of Julian of Norwich also came as she was lying on what was thought of as her deathbed, although she survived.95 Her experience qualifies as ordinary in the sense that a priest came to attend to her and hold a crucifix before her as she lay facing death. Her case, however, is exceptional in not only one but three ways: she experienced a series of revelations, chiefly from and of Christ, as did the o ­ thers we are discussing; but she was given visions and locutions entirely dif­fer­ent from t­ hose recorded elsewhere, not adhering closely to any traditional script for a deathbed scene; and her account of both her illness and her revelations is woven together with deeply theological reflection that goes well beyond what we find elsewhere. Being sui generis, her revelations serve h ­ ere mainly to show by contrast how exceptional piety has its own rules and its own manner of being ordinary. Having visions of Christ’s heart or of the child Christ was not an ordinary experience for lay parishioners, but it was to some degree ordinary for ­these nuns. Julian’s showings, on the other hand, are exceptional even when compared with other lit­er­a­ture of revelation. 93. ​BMK 1.22 (Windeatt, 86–88). 94. ​SB Adelhausen, 188, 159–60, 184. 95. ​The lit­er­a­ture on Julian is extensive; suffice it h ­ ere to cite Norwich, The Writings of Julian of Norwich: A Vision Showed to a Devout ­Woman and A Revelation of Love, ed. Jacqueline Jenkins, trans. Nicholas Watson (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007), the most painstaking edition of Julian’s texts.

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The death of a loved one was, as in any era, a time of grief that called for consolation, but in the Herald it could also be an occasion for cele­bration at the posthumous joy of the departed, concern for a soul in purgatory and in need of suffrage, and even attention to the plight of a soul already in heaven but without full capacity for enjoyment of its rewards. In more than one situation, then, the Herald shows the workings of the economy of intercession before Christ on his throne. In this context Christ declared what rewards the soul was enjoying, but also at times what offenses she must still atone for before being fully received into the joys of heaven. ­These postmortem accounts tend to be most keyed to liturgical events: ­there are prayers said ­after the death, the requiem mass, the burial ser­vice, and so forth. Somewhat as a mass may be offered for the sake of a deceased soul, so in this lit­er­a­ture a consecrated host may be offered for a departed friend. H ­ ere again we see a strong emphasis on the calculation and transfer of merit.96 Mass could be offered for a departed soul, but more particularly the consecrated host or the heart of Christ could be offered for a soul’s sake.97 Par­tic­u­ lar liturgical chants could be efficacious. ­After her abbess’s burial, it was while responsories ­were sung that Gertrude saw g­ reat exultation and dancing in heaven. ­Later, when the words from the office of the departed ­were read, “Come, you saints of God, and make haste, you angels of the Lord, and receive her soul,” Gertrude saw angels and saints who, as a ­sister had lain ­dying, had transferred to her their own merits. Now, when Christ was receiving that ­sister’s soul, t­ hese angels and saints received their own merits back, increased by their sharing in the ­sister’s merits.98 On another occasion, ­after the death of a ­sister, the offertory was sung at mass, and Christ appeared raising his right hand, from which a wondrous radiance shone forth, lighting all the heavens, but especially the soul that seemed seated on his lap.99 Again, a deceased ­sister appeared in glory to Gertrude, who asked her what effect the community’s intercession for her had achieved: they had sung the antiphon “Ex quo omnia” once for each day of her life and had had the mass of the Trinity sung for each year of her life, in thanksgiving for the ­favors bestowed on her. The 96. ​Cf. Finnegan, The ­Women of Helfta, 33 and 53–54, on transfer of Christ’s own merit and t­ hose of the Virgin and saints in Mechthild of Hackeborn. For the theme of purgatory in the lit­er­a­ture of Helfta, see especially Harrison, “Thousands and Thousands of Lovers,” chap. 7. For the same theme in another monastery see Hindsley, The Mystics of Engelthal, 182–83. By way of contrast, Lukardis of Oberweimar had revelations about the souls of the departed, but in the form of typical late medieval ghost stories, in which the deceased appears directly, without Christ’s explicit presence; VLSW cc. 73–80, pp. 353–57. 97. ​LDP 5.8.2, pp. 130–31 (Barratt, 66); 5.5.6, pp. 114–17 (Barratt, 56); 5.8.1, pp. 128–31 (Barratt, 65–66); 5.4.21, pp. 104–5 (Barratt, 50–51). 98. ​LDP 5.4.19–20, pp. 102–5 (Barratt, 49–50). 99. ​LDP 5.3.4, pp. 70–71 (Barratt, 33).

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s­ ister told her that for each antiphon Christ had bestowed a flower on her, while for the masses whenever she praised him, he had favored her with a delightful aroma that refreshed all the senses of her soul.100 A ­sister who had enjoyed the gifts and consolations of friends as her health declined died with the stain of that plea­sure on her soul. ­After her death Gertrude saw her as if standing in a doorway that led to Christ’s throne of glory, but she was held back as if by nails that snagged her clothing and held it fast—­ nails that represented the delight she had taken in her friends’ attention. Gertrude saw the prob­lem and prayed for the soul, and the impediment was undone. Even now, however, the soul was not wholly released from the consequences of her flaw. She appeared now standing before Christ’s throne, wishing to approach and enjoy his embraces and kisses. Christ held a crown in his hands, meant for her, but she could not advance to receive it. Gertrude expressed perplexity and perhaps even a mea­sure of exasperation that a soul could be thus tormented in Christ’s kingdom. Christ replied that she was not being tormented; rather she was like a ­little girl who saw in her ­mother’s hands the ornaments she would wear the next day at a feast: she awaited the feast with joy. The soul then gazed fondly at Gertrude, thankful for all her prayers. Gertrude said they had been close during life, but in her illness the ­woman had seemed less friendly. The soul replied, “On that account your prayer has been more beneficial to me now, b­ ecause it was poured forth more purely in charity for God’s sake.”101 The text reveals a flexible understanding of heaven, purgatory, and hell. In many cases, the nuns at Helfta seem to be purged or perfected ­after death not in purgatory but in heaven. A recently deceased ­sister appeared to Gertrude in ­great light before the throne of Christ, but they w ­ ere not embracing, b­ ecause she was not fully purged of her sin. Gertrude asked how this could be, when the soul stood in Christ’s very presence; the soul told her that e­ very creature is pre­sent to God, but it can gain special access only according to its perfection in charity. The deceased ­woman’s ­sister died soon afterward, and she too stood near Christ and appeared suffused with sweetness from his five wounds, yet she appeared downcast. Gertrude asked Christ how this could be, and he said he was showing her only the delights of his humanity, not his divinity, ­because she was not yet fully purged of her tendency on earth to enjoy frivolous com­pany. She needed to be purged of her faults, and in time she was “raised by the prayers of the Church.”102 100. ​LDP 5.4.22, pp. 106–9 (Barratt, 51). 101. ​LDP 5.9.3–7, pp. 136–43 (Barratt, 71–73). 102. ​LDP 5.5.1, pp. 108–11 (Barratt, 53); 5.5.3–6, pp. 112–17 (Barratt, 54–46).

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Transfer of merit might itself be seen as a meritorious deed, certainly a virtuous one, but it could also create difficulty for the one who performs it. When Gertrude reflected that she had transferred to a deceased s­ ister all the merit she had gained by her good works, she pleaded with Christ to look mercifully on her in her denuded condition. He asked her what he could do for someone who was thus denuded out of charity other than to cover that person with his own garment, enabling that person to recover what she has expended in charity. Still she feared she would have to come before him naked, ­because she had renounced ­future as well as past merits. He responded by calling to her mind the image of a ­mother covering a child with her own clothing. He then said that ­those who rely on their own merits are like ­people sitting at the sources of rivulets, while she, having annihilated herself by charity and humility, was like one seated at the abyss of the sea, possessing God the abyss of all blessedness.103 Christ may still h ­ ere be the king who passed judgment on souls, but he compares himself briefly to a ­mother before inviting Gertrude to meditate on divinity pictured not in anthropomorphic terms but as an incomprehensible abyss.

Conclusion In princi­ple Christ could come simply as himself, without adopting any more specific role, but usually he does in some way take on a par­tic­u­lar identity. The role may be largely implicit: even in a locution, he may be implicitly a bridegroom or lover of his interlocutor. Often, and especially in a vision, the role is more explicit. The shift from mysterious presence to bridegroom and then to enthroned king in narratives of sickness and death shows that the identity he chooses may be clearly linked to the occasion on which he is manifested. Elsewhere it may at times seem arbitrary, but one can never assume that it is so. If Christ is seen as holding agency and making the decision, he presumably has his reasons for choosing a par­tic­ul­ar role. His coming as an infant or a f­ ather, a physician or a pilgrim, is part of the message he means to convey. More fundamentally, his adopting any specific role implies his willingness ever and again to enter into the h ­ uman condition, almost as if incarnation ­were not sufficient, and he sought now to make up what was lacking in his historical life on earth. 103. ​LDP 5.8.3, pp. 130–33 (Barratt, 66–67). In the chapters of the Herald devoted to lay ­brothers and affiliates of the monastery, attention is devoted exclusively to the posthumous state of the ­brother’s soul and typically to its purgation. See LDP 5.22.3, pp.  196–97 (Barratt, 108–9); 5.13.1, pp. 160–63 (Barratt, 85); 5.14.1–2, pp. 162–67 (Barratt, 87–88); 5.15.1–2, pp. 166–69 (Barratt, 89–90); 5.16.1–5, pp. 168–77 (Barratt, 91–94); 5.18.1–2, pp. 178–81 (Barratt, 97–98); 5.19.3–5, pp. 184–89 (Barratt, 100–102); 5.12.1–2, pp. 150–55 (Barratt, 81–82).

C h a p te r   8

The Presence of Christ in Social Dynamics

If Christ enters into culture, he enters also into community. To put the point more sharply: the texts we are discussing not only envision communities that are devoted to Christ and see themselves as interacting with him at a distance; often they go further and see him as a member along with ­others, interacting with them as they interact with each other, within the immanent sphere of the community. The experience of Christ’s presence might be viewed as an intensely private experience, nurtured inwardly by individuals. Even if to an extent that way of seeing t­hings is true, such experience always occurs within a social ­context: it is conditioned by contact with ­others, and it ­ripples through the life of a community. Rosalynn Voaden speaks of the community at Helfta as “a place of mutual support, spiritual reassurance and practical assistance,” a place where the nuns discussed each other’s visions and where occasional tensions amid the harmony make the depiction plausible.1 The community 1. ​Rosalynn Voaden, “All Girls Together: Community, Gender and Vision at Helfta,” in Medieval ­ omen in Their Communities, ed. Diane Watt (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 75, 79–80. W The communal relations at Helfta are the par­tic­u­lar focus of Anna Harrison, “Thousands and Thousands of Lovers”: Sense of Community among the Nuns of Helfta (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press/Cistercian Publications, 2022), which is now the indispensable work on this topic. On tensions at Helfta, see also Michael Bangert, “Die sozio-­kulturelle Situation des Klosters St. Maria in Helfta,” in “Vor dir steht die leere Schale meiner Sehnsucht”: Die Mystik der Frauen von Helfta, ed. Michael Bangert and Hildegund Keul, 2nd ed. (Leipzig: Benno, 1999), 45. 255

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included not only t­ hose presently in residence but t­ hose in the f­ uture as well: Mechthild of Hackeborn received spiritual f­avors for p­ eople in the f­ uture and prayed for all who would read her revelations.2 The accounts of all three ­women at Helfta indicate not only that they w ­ ere concerned about their ­sisters, and that the interest was reciprocal, but that Christ too took an interest in the community and in social relations within it. And much the same can be said of the ­later Dominican monasteries depicted in the sister-­books. In ­those texts ­there is if anything even more interest in social dynamics—or perhaps, rather, they show more interest in the social particularities of everyday life. The social context for the ­later Dominican ­houses was in several ways complex. Even ­those that began with strong aristocratic ties and drew members largely from aristocratic families soon tended ­toward greater diversity. While having s­ isters who came from the same families could create its own set of tensions, socially diverse membership carried with it the potential for misunderstanding and friction. Even though they ­were cloistered, the ­sisters remained dependent on their local communities for support, and the rituals of enclosure ­were public events that included local laity and bound them to support the communities of nuns.3 The nuns owned and administered property in surrounding towns and villages, some of which they rented, which again meant involvement in a social network. It is not surprising that social relationships within ­these complex and nesting communities find expression in the sister-­books; nor perhaps is it surprising that Christ is shown taking part in the social interaction. Broadly speaking, Helfta and the Dominican h ­ ouses ­were alike in being communities of shared devotional culture, in which ­sisters took a lively interest in revelations to other ­sisters and in which the community was seen as specially elect and itself the subject of revelation. Again broadly speaking, in comparison with the lit­er­a­ture of Helfta, the sister-­books show even more explicit attention to dramas of interacting personalities, more of an expectation that revelations w ­ ill reinforce communal ethos, and more engagement with the surrounding world. Helfta and the sister-­books are alike in showing the 2. ​Margarete Hubrath, Schreiben und Erinnern: Zur “memoria” im Liber specialis gratiae Mechthilds von Hakeborn (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1996), 43, 52. 3. ​Christian Folini, Katharinental und Töss: Zwei mystische Zentren in sozialgeschichtlicher Perspektive (Zürich: Chronos, 2007), 90–146 (on relations with ­family and friends), 164–95 (on the nuns’ friends from vari­ous social backgrounds), and 293–326 (everyday life within the monastery), especially 305–6 (the nuns’ relations with each other).” See also John Van Engen, “Communal Life: The Sister-­Books,” in Medieval Holy ­Women in the Christian Tradition, c. 1100–­c. 1500, ed. Alastair Minnis and Rosalynn Voaden (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010), 123. On the enclosure ceremonies and ties to the local community see Claire Taylor Jones, Ruling the Spirit: W ­ omen, Liturgy, and Dominican Reform in Late Medieval Germany (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), 135–42.

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s­ isters gathered at deathbeds and interceding for souls in purgatory, but t­ hese themes are worked out differently in ­these bodies of lit­er­a­ture. In part the differences may be accounted for in terms of patronage: while Helfta was from the outset patronized by regional aristocratic families, who sent many of their ­daughters ­there to become nuns, the Dominican ­houses w ­ ere to a somewhat greater degree dependent on the local communities in which they w ­ ere located. The differences may also stem in some mea­sure from the greater social heterogeneity of the Dominican h ­ ouses; when many p­ eople from sharply differing backgrounds belong to a community, the differences may become occasions for misunderstanding and friction. How far t­ hese explanations account for what we find in the sources is a question that needs to be explored.

Communities of Shared Devotional Culture Devotion mediates between private and communal religion.4 It may become internal and private: devotion to the crucified Christ, to the infant Jesus, to his ­mother, to the saints may often become an individual exercise leading away from community and ­toward the privacy of inward religion. While liturgy may thus seem more public and communal, devotion seems private and individual. But what­ever validity t­ here may be to this distinction, it is also potentially misleading. Devotions ­were not just spontaneous but learned, and the learning that took place within community could serve as a cultural bond among members of that community. Devotions could at times be group exercises. Even when a devotional motif was cultivated in private, it could build on what ­others had experienced, spoken, and given for recording; even private life became communal property. The exercise of devotion might involve communication with Christ, and that communication might become part of the community’s devotional culture, even if it was given to an individual. Among the lessons Christ gave to Mechthild of Hackeborn ­were forms of devotion, which she evidently passed along to o ­ thers at Helfta.5 To arouse devotion of the faithful t­ oward the image of Christ linked with Veronica’s veil, she taught the s­ isters to go on a kind of vicarious, imaginary pilgrimage to Rome on the day the image was displayed. They should recite as many Pater Nosters as t­ here are miles between their location and Rome, then confess their 4. ​Richard Kieckhefer, “Major Currents in Late Medieval Devotion,” in Christian Spirituality, ed. Jill Raitt (New York: Crossroad, 1987), 2:75–108. 5. ​Rosalynn Voaden, “Mechtild of Hackeborn,” in Medieval Holy ­Women in the Christian Tradition, c. 1100–­c. 1500, ed. Alastair Minnis and Rosalynn Voaden (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010), 441–42; Mary Jeremy Finnegan, The ­Women of Helfta: Scholars and Mystics (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991), 30.

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sins to God “the pope.” On that same day, she had a vision of Christ seated on a flowered mountain. She saw all t­ hose who ­were preparing to venerate the image come forward to Christ carry­ing their sins on their shoulders and placing them before his feet, where they ­were transformed into golden offerings, and Christ provided a banquet for all. She prayed for all ­those who commended themselves to her prayer. He said none of them should be separated from him. Also on that occasion she saw a cord of love extending from the heart of God into her soul, by which she drew to God all ­those standing in his presence.6 This is a rec­ord of a private vision of Christ, but it begins with the story of Mechthild instructing the s­ isters collectively, and even the vision that grows out of the group exercise still relates to all t­ hose who are participating in the vicarious pilgrimage. Devotion h ­ ere involves imagination realized within community, fashioning the community into a band of vicarious pilgrims whose social bond is ratified by its teacher’s revelatory experience. The devotional culture found in texts and images was manifestly a shared culture, and private devotions grew out of the shared liturgical experience of the community. Handheld crucifixes ­were smaller versions of ­those that hung in church, and ­these w ­ ere carried in pro­cession. Devotions that had been claimed as private could always be reclaimed as public. Several passages in the Herald tell how Gertrude handled the crucifix devoutly and learned that a person gazing at the crucifix should think of Christ speaking to her in her heart.7 Gertrude herself often heard Christ speak to her from the crucifix. But during a time of inclement weather the nuns held a pro­cession, and as they ­were returning to their monastery Christ spoke from the pro­cessional cross, saying, “­Here am I with my army, come to beseech you, God the ­Father, in the form in which I reconciled all h ­ uman nature.”8 Christ h ­ ere speaks as a member of the community, addressing the ­Father as a member of that community rather than himself a person of the Trinity.

Communities with Interest in Their Members’ Revelations When Christ made revelations to individual nuns, they ­were typically meant in one way or other for the community, intended for sharing. Christ revealed to Christina Ebner at Engelthal that he dwelt in her innermost heart, giving 6. ​LSG 1.10, pp. 31–34 (Newman, 54–56). 7. ​LDP 3.41.3 (Barratt, 137). 8. ​LDP 3.31.1 (Barratt, 119); cf. Genesis 9:13.

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her the power to draw the other s­ isters to him, and through her he would cause the other nuns’ hearts to burn with love for him.9 One recurrent theme is the tension between concealment and disclosure. This was the case at Helfta: even though Mechthild of Hackeborn is said to have preferred confidentiality, she granted that Christ wished disclosure. In the sister-­books we can more often hear the buzz of rumor or the proclamation of a message meant for a network of s­ isters. We glimpse more frequently the transition from confidentiality to privileged sharing to full disclosure, as when a ­sister at Unterlinden three days before her death told a vision to some devout and trustworthy ­sister, who told it to another ­sister, detail by detail, for recording.10 The lit­er­a­ture of Helfta is mostly the rec­ord of shared experience, revelations related perhaps in confidence but then recorded and disseminated in ever wider circles. Precisely how the pro­cess worked—or was ­imagined to have worked—is more explicit in the sister-­books than in the lit­er­at­ ure of Helfta. Rumor might lead to interrogation. A nun in the convent of Töss heard that another member of the community, Adelheit of Frauenberg, was privileged with visionary experience. She asked S­ ister Adelheit to tell about her visions, promising not to divulge anything while Adelheit was still alive. The visionary affirmed that Christ and the Virgin had come to her. In what manner had they appeared? The Virgin had come first, comforting her and guaranteeing that eternity with her and her child would be her reward for a life well lived, but she must first suffer a ­g reat deal. What, then, about her vision of Christ? Adelheit told tearfully how she had seen him hovering above her on the cross, bleeding, the Virgin standing beside him. He had reached down from the cross and embraced her, promising that he would be her eternal reward ­after she suffered. She consented. Christ then raised himself up, and his wounds ­were all healed: she had healed him with her tears, compassion, and patient willingness to endure suffering in honor of his Passion. Then she saw him no more. Was the Virgin ­there throughout this vision? Adelheit could not say, but when she did not see Christ, then she saw the Virgin. Another nun of Töss was likewise questioned, but by the serving maid who came to her a­ fter matins and inquired about her experience.11 One of the most searching accounts of visionary experience comes from a similar dialogue between Else of Núwenstatt at Adelhausen and an unnamed ­sister who questioned her about her experiences. Did she see Christ with inner or outer eyes? Both, but outer vision is nothing compared to inner. Did she see 9. ​Leonard Patrick Hindsley, The Mystics of Engelthal: Writings from a Medieval Monastery (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 1998), 75–78. 10. ​SB Unterlinden, 413. 11. ​SB Töss, 53–54, 86.

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the deity? Yes, she saw F ­ ather, Son, and Holy Spirit. When Christ appeared to her bodily eyes, what was he like? He appeared as a comely young man, accompanied with a retinue of angels and saints; he sat before her, looking graciously at her and assuring her he would come again and again, take her to himself, and through eternity never be parted from her. What sort of garments did he have on? He wears what he ­will, but she could not identify the colors.12 In t­ hese cases the sharing came in response to awed curiosity, but sometimes the ­sister who received the revelation recognized it all along not as just hers but theirs. One s­ ister of Töss saw Christ come to her accompanied by the nuns of the convent. From this she realized that where the convent was, ­there Christ was also.13 The vision affirmed the nuns’ collective association with Christ and his presence to them as a community. And when Mezzi Sidwibrin of Töss had experienced an apparition of the child Christ, she went about crying to the ­sisters, “­Children, ­children! Jesus is ours!,” meaning something close to “Jesus is among us!”14 This formulation makes explicit that visions and apparitions are impor­tant for the community even when they are experienced by one individual. The sister-­books further call attention to community by relating transitive visions and linked experiences, in which one ­sister witnesses the experience of another or dif­fer­ent ­sisters play correlative roles. The Gotteszell book tells how one of the ­sisters was ­dying, so the Virgin came to visit her, leaving Jesus ­behind with ­sister Adelheit of Hiltegarthausen for baby­sitting, and ­after the ailing s­ ister died, Mary returned and took the child with her.15 It is not surprising ­here that Mary rather than Jesus provided deathbed consolation. More relevant for our purposes is that one s­ ister is bearing witness to the experience of another and relating it to her own. Paradoxically, the sister-­books can also emphasize that the exceptional ­sisters who are memorialized kept quiet about their experiences. If an experience was not meant for the community, it should not be held up before the community. For example, around the hour of none, Agnes of Bilzheim at Unterlinden went into a secluded place to pray, and once she saw a ray of light from heaven come straight into her chest, like a kind of ­laser pointer; at such moments it seemed to her she was sitting in the heart of God, and he became oblivious to all o ­ thers and focused all his attention on her alone, as she mentioned in confidence to a few of the s­isters.16 The themes of privacy, seclusion, secrecy, confidentiality, and singularity pervade the Unterlinden book. ­Here in the account of ­Sister 12. ​SB Adelhausen, 177–79. 13. ​SB Töss, 68: “wa der cofent ist, das och er da ist.” 14. ​SB Töss, 28–29. 15. ​SB Gotteszell, 125. 16. ​SB Unterlinden, 472.

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Agnes they are compounded: the location for her prayer is secluded, the ray of light thrusts into the innermost recesses of her heart, and she and God are bound together in a moment of intimacy that precludes awareness of all ­else on ­either side, much like Rilke’s encounter of the angel and the Virgin: “nur sie und er . . . ​und nirgends als an dieser Stelle.”17 But in the end confidentiality did not last, and the emphasis on its importance only shows the strength of the pressure for disclosure and sharing. As we read on we discover that in princi­ple any of the s­ isters can have such experiences, and precisely b­ ecause they are so private, one might never know about them. It is only much l­ater, ­after death, that the few confidantes who know what has happened ­will tell ­others—­which means that no one ­sister can claim special f­avor, ­because the s­ isters to her left and to her right may enjoy their own mystical experiences. Where every­one can in princi­ple be special, no one is special, and what would be exceptional outside the community is portrayed as ordinary within it.18 The communal relevance of a revelation was perhaps clearest when it involved a message not only for but about the community and especially when it gave assurance of the community’s very survival, a phenomenon we have already seen operating at Helfta. Rather than being a mark of special grace for an individual, divine ­favor is revealed as lavished on all in the monastery. A nun of Unterlinden had a dream vision in which the Virgin sat in the monastery work ­house surrounded by a ­great multitude of ­sisters from their monastery and other persons, and she attended to the needs of all, giving each of them fitting counsel and aid. Another had a Pentecostal vision of divine fire descending from heaven upon the ­sisters of the convent collectively, with a ray of light enveloping each of them, and elsewhere Christ himself hovered over the community.19 Like many of the visions in the sister-­books, ­these take place in a liturgical setting, and at specified points in the liturgical year, in a way that calls attention to the bonding of the community within the context of the liturgical exercises meant to subordinate individuality to communion. More consistently perhaps than ­others, the Adelhausen sister-­book exalts not only the individual nuns but the community as such, particularly at times when it was threatened with closure. A voice assured the ­sisters that their monastery 17. ​Rainer Maria Rilke, The Life of Mary (Das Marien-­Leben): The German Text with an En­glish Translation, trans. N. K. Cruickshank (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1952), 16–17. 18. ​See Barbara Newman, “The Visionary Texts and Visual Worlds of Religious W ­ omen,” in Crown and Veil: Female Monasticism from the Fifth to the Fifteenth Centuries, ed. Jeffrey F. Hamburger and Susan Marti, trans. Dietlinde Hamburger (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 163–64: “In the Dominican s­ ister books, we find a radical democ­ratization of grace. Phenomena that had once characterized only saints . . . ​are now part of the community’s everyday life. . . . ​Visionary experience, represented as a unique miracle in Hildegard’s life and still exceptional in Gertrude’s, has now become normative.” 19. ​SB Unterlinden, 400–401, 360–61, 362; cf. SB Kirchberg, 108, 114.

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would last, or if necessary it, would be reestablished, and that it played a providential role: when God hung on the cross he foresaw this as a community in which his wounds would be healed, as a place where his Passion would be remembered to the end of time, as a location where no one could remain for long in mortal sin.20 Divine intervention could provide counsel for ­those elected to office within the community, which meant that it would affect the community as such at least indirectly, through its leadership. A nun chosen as prioress of Adelhausen was at first unwilling to accept the office and prayed before the Corpus Christi altar that she might be spared the office, but a divine voice said she should accept it in obedience. Indeed, her obedience was more precious to him than that of Abraham, b­ ecause what Abraham sacrificed was external to himself, while she was being called to renounce her own ­will, which was inward.21

Communities as Themselves the Subjects of Revelation Revelations about the community’s privilege of special divine favor, and about the well-being that Christ guaranteed it, call for closer attention. The nuns of Helfta had visions of ­others in the community, they ­were shown the entire community as one of “shining mirrors on earth and sparkling mirrors in heaven,” they w ­ ere given an allegory about a spiritual convent in which officers personify virtues, and in one vision members of the community danced around their late abbess on the anniversary of her death.22 For all three w ­ omen of Helfta the monastic community was itself a subject of revelation, but it figured somewhat differently. To simplify: for Mechthild of Magdeburg, the newcomer, the community was an object of concern; for Mechthild of Hackeborn, who served for years as one of the leading figures at Helfta and whose s­ ister was abbess, it was an object of blessing; and for Gertrude, who did not serve in office but was clearly much sought a­ fter by insiders and outsiders alike for counsel and who discerned that not all members ­were equally worthy, it was an object of scrutiny. ­Toward the end of The Flowing Light, Mechthild of Magdeburg tells of two revelations directly concerning the community. In the first, she was praying one night and saw Christ standing in the cemetery, with the w ­ hole commu20. ​SB Adelhausen, 157, 162; cf. 156, 163, 174, 177. 21. ​SB Adelhausen, 161. 22. ​Voaden, “All Girls Together,” 81. For parallels see Martha G. Newman, Cistercian Stories for Nuns and Monks: The Sacramental Imagination of Engelhard of Langheim (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020), chap. 5.

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nity gathered before him, lined up by se­niority within the h ­ ouse. He said he had chosen them, and if they chose him, he would make them shining mirrors on earth and radiant mirrors in heaven. But he said ­there ­were some among them who knew him, and by implication ­others who did not.23 The nuns w ­ ere gathered not in the choir but in the cemetery, where proximity could not ensure community. The living nuns w ­ ere perceived not as a worshiping community but as a gathering of individuals, some of whom would be found lacking. The scene is one of tension between chosen-­ness and lack, between community and individuality. The second revelation was more overtly foreboding but also more hopeful. Mechthild was sorry for the community at a time when it was in distress, and during the night she said to Christ, “Lord, how do you like this prison?” He said he was held captive in it, fasting in the desert with the nuns, tormented with them by the ­enemy, toiling all his life with them, betrayed and taken captive with them, bound in obedience with them, suffering and ­dying with them, then arising so they might arise from their failings, and ascending into heaven where they might follow him.24 Mechthild of Hackeborn, as chantress, was far more likely to envision the nuns as a worshiping community, in their choir, and to view them t­ here as jointly blessed, even if in dif­fer­ent manners. Once, a­ fter communion, she heard Christ say, “We wish to have conversation with each other.” At once she saw him enthroned before the altar, and all the souls of the congregation seemed to go out of their bodies, in the form of virgins clothed with white robes, and sat at his feet, while the prelates sat facing him. He said, “I am in the midst of you, as one who ministers. You are the ones who remained with me in my temptations, and I dispose for you a kingdom, as the ­father disposed for me, that you may eat and drink at my t­ able in my kingdom” (Luke 22:27–30). She understood that Christ dwelt in the congregation in a threefold manner: in some members by the savoring of grace, in ­others by the understanding of scripture, and in yet o ­ thers by the reception of teaching. When she asked for further clarification, he said it pleased him for the congregation to receive communion often, and she saw all the members go forward and drink from his heart through three tubes that he extended to them, as all the saints in heaven also did.25 ­There are distinctions within the community, but as Anna Harrison points out, the distinctions tend to be of clusters rather than individuals: “it is more often groups—­not individuals—­that are distinguished from one another according to degrees of devotion, quality of intention, and so on.”26 23. ​FLG 7.14, 558–59 (Tobin, 286–87). 24. ​FLG 7.53, pp. 634–37 (Tobin, 321–22). 25. ​LSG 4.1, pp. 257–58 (Newman, 162–64). 26. ​Harrison, “Thousands and Thousands of Lovers,” 9.

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For the younger Mechthild apparitions in the choir of the nuns’ church ­were the usual occasions for benediction to the community as a ­whole, even if the nuns ­were not equally aware of Christ’s presence. Christ and his ­mother circulated through the assembly and showed affection to each ­sister, or he would stand in the ­middle of the choir with radiance from his face shining on all.27 ­These visions could become discriminatory: Christ and his m ­ other might bless some but not all the nuns.28 But the strong emphasis for the younger Mechthild is blessing shared with the community as a ­whole. Mechthild saw occasion for blessing even in the context of adversity. When the congregation was ­under interdict on account of a debt, the nuns ­were grieving that they w ­ ere without communion, but Mechthild had a vision in which Christ wiped the tears from her eyes and held her hands, saying, “­Today you ­will see won­ders.” A pro­cessional responsory was intoned, and it seemed to her that the entire congregation lined up for pro­cession with Christ and his ­mother at the head. They went around the choir and into the church, where saints participated in the cele­bration of mass, with Christ as both priest and elevated host. Each member of the congregation received communion from Christ’s hand, and the Virgin held a gold vessel with a gold straw to Christ’s side, by which they all sucked the fluid that came from his breast. When mass was over, Christ gave blessing with gold rings on all his fin­gers, signifying his betrothal with all the virgins, and rubies signifying that his blood was an ornament especially for the virgins.29 Gertrude too saw divine f­avor as something extended to the community as such. One responsory that referred to intercessory prayer evoked a vision of the Virgin praying for all members of the convent, and when Christ granted her full command over the forces of heaven, she ordered one of the angelic choirs to encircle Gertrude’s convent, protecting it from the Dev­il’s deceits.30 Still, like the elder Mechthild, Gertrude saw the community as a mixed one with worthy and less worthy members. The significance of mass for the monastic community as such is clear in many passages, but especially in one exceptionally long chapter from Book 3 of the Herald.31 Much of the chapter deals with worthiness and preparation to receive the sacrament. One colorful 27. ​LSG 3.20, p. 223; 1.4, p. 13; cf. 1.25, pp. 86–87; 1.23, p. 83. 28. ​Cf. SB Unterlinden, 409–10; Martinus Cowley, trans., Send Me God: The Lives of Ida the Compassionate of Nivelles, Nun of La Ramée, Arnulf, Lay B ­ rother of Villers, and Abundus, Monk of Villers, by Goswin of Bossut (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003), c. 19c, p. 59. 29. ​LSG 1.27, pp. 95–97 (Newman, 101–2). For another case of Christ administering communion, see VCH c. 33 (trans., p. 40). 30. ​LDP 4.9.1–2 and 6 (Barratt, 55–56 and 59). 31. ​LDP 3.18 (Barratt, 70–81).

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passage explains that a person who commits sins of the tongue and then receives Christ on that tongue is like a person “who buries a visitor on his arrival by piling up stones on the doorstep, or hits him on the head with a hard crow-­bar!”32 While that concern for worthiness is something Gertrude applies in the first instance to herself, she does talk about how other nuns w ­ ere or ­were not prepared for communion. At one point she sees one of the nuns approaching fearfully and then “turned away ­because of disgust, as if in anger.” Christ explains that he deserves both “the reverence of honor” and “the sweetness of love,” but weak h ­ uman nature cannot combine t­ hese attitudes, so one person must compensate for what is lacking in another, “since you are members one of another.” A person with an abundance of love may lack due reverence, but someone ­else ­will provide that for her vicariously.33 Even the heavenly reward of an individual ­sister brought benefits for her community as well: the deceased might be seen asking Christ to bless the community, which he then would do, or the departed s­ ister might provide golden tubes by which the living could draw what they wished from Christ’s heart.34 Lukardis of Oberweimar also received revelations pertaining to the community: the convent was spared in a storm and flood by her merits, when it was predicted that the convent would be destroyed by fire, she prayed and averted that fate, and at her request the convent was protected from thieves.35 At a time of difficulty she prayed for comfort and saw a ­g reat light above her, from which came a voice saying, “Do not be disheartened, ­daughter, do not, for I am he who is with you in tribulation, and just as you have compassion on my Passion, so I have compassion on your tribulation, and just as you suffer with me, so too I suffer with you.”36 In the sister-­books, divine ­favor is at times shown to the monastic communities but could extend to the broader community outside the walls. When Colmar was ­under siege, and the s­ isters of Unterlinden feared danger to their ­house, one s­ ister prayed to the Virgin to defend them, took an image of the Virgin all through the monastery three times, and obtained relief of the siege not just for the monastery but for the entire city. At the end of her pro­cession Christ revealed that ­because of the ­sisters’ prayers, he would save their ­house from all ­hazards.37 32. ​LDP 3.18.9 (Barratt, 74). 33. ​LDP 3.18.19 (Barratt, 77–78). 34. ​LDP 5.1 (Barratt, 5–27); 5.4.21, pp. 104–5 (Barratt, 50–51); cf. 5.4.19–20, pp. 102–5 (Barratt, 49–50); cf. 5.7.3, pp. 124–27 (Barratt, 62–63). 35. ​VLSW c. 60, pp. 345–46; c. 61, p. 346; c. 70, pp. 351–52. 36. ​VLSW c. 48, p. 336. 37. ​SB Unterlinden, 391–92.

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Communities with Dramas of Interacting Personalities Even more than the lit­er­a­ture of Helfta, the sister-­books deal with incidents from everyday life in the monastery and interaction with the surrounding community. B ­ ecause Christ’s presence was represented as pervasive and almost routine, the most ordinary moments of life in the convent could be occasions for Christophany. Else of Núwenstatt at Adelhausen fell out of bed one night and was hurt badly, yet in the morning she was cheerful and said Christ had come ­after the fall and told her he did not want her to do that again. Still, she declared that she valued the suffering he gave her as much as the kindness he showed.38 Alhaid Ortlibin of Engelthal lost her way in the dormitory when the light was out, and Christ appeared in a ­great light and showed her the way to her bed; she asked who he was, and he replied, “I am called Rex regum et dominus dominancium, king of kings and lord of lords.”39 In a community accustomed to divine intervention, the most minor crises merited divine attention. An incident from the sister-­book of Katharinental illustrates graphically the intersection of the marvelous and the quotidian. When the nuns sang “Christus natus” at Christmas matins, one ­sister had a vision of the Nativity, with the child in the manger accompanied by Mary and Joseph and the apocryphal ox and ass, but then she had to go into the kitchen, and ­there she again saw the child, who followed her about wherever she went, having evidently learned already to climb out of the manger and walk or perhaps crawl.40 Even when the s­ isters are excluded from community on account of illness, or when they step aside from the communal setting, the social world that is taken as a norm remains clearly in the background. Hedwig of Laufenburg was with a group of ­sisters who ­were conversing ­after dinner, but it occurred to her “on account of the Lord” that she should leave that recreational gathering and go to the choir, where she had a vision of heaven and saw the souls of some p­ eople she had known when they ­were alive.41 It is only ­after we see her mingling with o ­ thers that we see her stepping aside into the dif­fer­ent social environment of heaven. The Engelthal compilation shows special interest in the interactions of the nuns and t­ hose around them. It portrays Christ as pre­sent within a community, in a drama of interacting personalities. The mystical encounters with Christ narrated in the Engelthal sister-­book more often than not take the form 38. ​SB Adelhausen, 179. 39. ​SB Engelthal, 24; cf. SB Weiler, 72. 40. ​SB Katharinental, 108. 41. ​SB Unterlinden, 440.

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of visions rather than locutions: Christ is pre­sent as a character on stage, not a voice heard from offstage. The characteristic themes of the Engelthal sister-­ book can be seen in the account of ­Sister Alheit of Trochaw. When she was ready to make her vows, the prioress would not receive them, b­ ecause her ­father was ill. Deeply troubled, Alheit went before a crucifix and cried so much that Christ’s feet became all wet; then Christ stretched his hand down from the cross, raised her up, and promised he would help her. Soon afterward, the prioress fell u ­ nder some accusation and had to withdraw to Regensburg to defend herself, and another prioress was chosen who gladly acceded to Alheit’s wish.42 Even in this brief account we have a minidrama with five characters: the protagonist Alheit, the antagonist prioress, the ­father, the new prioress, and Christ. Issues of membership in the community, responsibilities to ­family, antagonism among the nuns, and resolution through recourse to an outside authority are all raised, and a satisfying outcome is ensured by Christ’s intervention. ­Here as in other accounts, the emphasis on interpersonal connections at Engelthal makes Christ into a character in this communal drama—an extraordinary character, to be sure, but one whose presence is a catalyst for relations among the other characters. Being in relationship with Christ affects the way a nun relates to ­those in the community around her. A simpler social setting underlies the account of Alheid of Igelstadt. Christ appeared to her one night and told her he was about to take her to her eternal reward. She had a companion to whom Christ also appeared that same night, saying, “I wish to take your friend to myself.” When they came together the next morning, the two s­ isters quickly reported to each other on t­hese revelations, and Alheid told her friend that she must have a pure soul, b­ ecause Christ spoke with her just as he had with Alheid herself. The two clearly enjoyed special friendship within the community. One night they w ­ ere reading matins together, and reading so devoutly that they never looked up, but then Alheid turned abruptly and looked up earnestly at the companion, which was uncharacteristic of her. The next morning her friend asked Alheid why she had looked at her that way, and Alheid said it was ­because it seemed Christ was extending himself more graciously ­toward her than ­toward Alheid herself.43 As elsewhere in ­human relations, intimacy exposed her to the possibility of feeling slighted. We find in the Engelthal sister-­book encounters in which the mystic beheld and conversed with Christ, while bystanders could hear only one side of the dialogue. Christ once came into the refectory, accompanied by angels, and spoke with a child who had come into the monastery with her m ­ other; all who 42. ​SB Engelthal, 12. 43. ​SB Engelthal, 18.

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­ ere at t­ able t­ here heard the child’s answers but not Christ’s speech.44 Even a w lay patron could play the role of mystic privileged to see and hear Christ while bystanders could hear only his side of the exchange. A nobleman residing at Schonberg became deathly ill, but Christ appeared to him one night in light brighter than the sun, and his wife thought the ­castle was on fire. When she approached, she was able to hear his answers to Christ—in par­tic­u­lar, “Lord, I ­will gladly do that”—­but not what Christ himself was saying. When he came to himself, she asked with whom he had been speaking, and he said Christ had instructed him to establish and endow an altar at Engelthal, in return for which he would not now die.45 It was thus not only the nuns themselves who made up the communal network affected by interaction with Christ. The friars carry­ing out cura monialium also played roles in this drama. The Dominican friar Conrad of Eystet was assigned to provide care for the nunnery, and he loved Alheit of Trochaw on account of her holiness. Indeed, they w ­ ere so close that she was able to see Christ’s body in his hands whenever he celebrated mass, ­whether near or far, and when he offended God, she was aware of that too. But once she asked him to administer communion to her, and he pleaded that he needed to go out begging. She told him to go ahead and see what he was given; he got only a few coins, so he realized he had offended her, and he asked her forgiveness, but that did not suffice. Christ said to her, “I have extinguished a light between you and him that ­will never again be kindled.” From that time onward she no longer saw Christ’s body in his hands, and she no longer knew what he was ­doing except when he was near her. They quarreled again on another occasion, when she was unwilling to go out with him on business ­because she was having a vision of Christ. She said if Conrad wanted, he could come join her in the visionary experience. She knew that Conrad would see Christ as she did. When he demanded that she come out, she told him to let go of his anger, saying he knew full well that if he ­were enjoying this experience, he would remain in it. Overwhelmed with love, he broke out in tears and ran out, while she remained a long time in her experience of grace and then went out on her own.46 The friar h ­ ere plays the foil to the pious nun, in this drama of friendship, tension, frustration, and loss that reflects the interactions routine in monastic life, h ­ ere given the luster of mystical significance and rendered more poignant with its heightened intensity. In the Engelthal sister-­book, then, revelations often serve as parables for life in community. They have the dramatic quality of many of the gospel parables, and 44. ​SB Engelthal, 8. 45. ​SB Engelthal, 4. 46. ​SB Engelthal, 13–14.

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like ­these they dramatize the significance of ordinary life from the perspective of eternity. But rather than being parables told by Christ, they are parables in which Christ himself is a character come to transform the community. While the lit­er­a­ture of Helfta has stories about intercessory prayer, an example from the Unterlinden sister-­book shows in more detail what such a development might look like. One of the ­sisters had two ­brothers who ­were locked in a long-­lasting feud, and she feared that one of them would die a terrible death, so she went to ­Sister Herburg of Herenkeim, who stood in prayer from the end of matins ­until prime, supporting her aged limbs with a staff. When Herburg received assurance from the Holy Spirit that the ­brothers would be reconciled, she related that prophecy to the concerned ­sister through another of the nuns.47 Even in this short narrative we have at least five actors—­the two ­sisters within the monastery, the two ­brothers outside it, and the Holy Spirit—­and we can see how the ­sisters bring their spiritual resources to bear on a typical social prob­lem in the outside world.48 A further story from the Unterlinden sister-­book illustrates an impor­tant point about social interaction within the Dominican h ­ ouses. S­ ister Hedwig of Laufenburg was praying one day in the nunnery’s chapel choir when she saw three vested angels enter, step up to the altar, remove a consecrated host from the pyx, then proceed to the infirmary, where they gave communion to an ailing ­sister. Hedwig rushed to the infirmary and conferred with the convalescent, asking if she had seen or felt anything special at that moment. Perhaps put on the spot by this extraordinary inquiry, the s­ister replied that she had seen nothing outwardly, but inwardly she had perceived a rush of sweetness in her soul. Hedwig then related her vision point by point, explaining to the ailing w ­ oman the source of her inward consolation.49 At first glance, this seems a commonplace variation on the miraculous communion stories with which the Unterlinden sister-­book and kindred documents abound. But the narrative calls for closer attention. The one ­sister is privileged over the other as the recipient of the miraculous communion. But from another perspective it is the witness to the miracle who is privileged, ­because she enjoys the more striking and more explicit revelation. As the story is told, however, the two ­sisters do not engage in rivalry of any sort. Perhaps most importantly, the w ­ omen are assumed to have experienced the same event, even if they experienced it from complementary perspectives. They did not enjoy merely similar experiences, or experiences equal in value; the 47. ​SB Unterlinden, 392–93. 48. ​­Whether Christ also plays a role h ­ ere is ambiguous: the s­ ister prays to “the Lord” (prob­ably meaning Christ) and is answered by the Holy Spirit. 49. ​SB Unterlinden, 448–49. For an in­ter­est­ing parallel, see Robert Easting and Richard Sharpe, Peter of Cornwall’s Book of Revelations (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2013), 246–49 (2.891).

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point is precisely that they shared in the same event. The s­ ister who has beheld a vision and the one who has not are brought within the same circle and find themselves witnesses to a shared real­ity. The story does not challenge the differences, but what it emphasizes is convergence of experience, not divergence. It is a narrative about mutually willed inattention to difference, about members of a community in which singularity is downplayed and focus is placed on sharing.50

Communities’ Revelatory Reinforcement of Communal Ethos Experience of Christ’s presence could express and reinforce the moral norms meant to be upheld within the community, which, as Claire Taylor Jones has shown, was a significant concern of the sister-­books.51 ­These norms might provide a link between prayer and ser­vice, between oratio and ­labor. Anna Turnerin of Adelhausen experienced an infusion of grace when she prayed, and especially when she received communion. On one occasion she had a lively sense of Christ’s presence in prayer, then she told him she would leave him to go out and serve the sick, but he outran her and appeared to her as she was about to enter the infirmary.52 The norm most often reinforced by revelation was the importance of obedience: revelation did not imply privilege but rather submission. Berta of Herten at Katharinental saw Christ sitting in the refectory, but the refectory wall was like glass, b­ ehind which was a person who seemed to be heartbroken b­ ecause she could not break through the glass and come to Christ. He explained to Berta that the glass was self-­will, and the person on the other side could not approach him ­because she was not as obedient as Berta.53 In general, revelation was itself less impor­tant than liturgy: when Christ appeared to one nun during the divine office, she had to tell him, “Dearly beloved Lord, I should be reading matins right now.”54 It is in the Katharinental sister-­book that we find most explic­itly and recurrently the theme that enjoying the manifest presence of Christ must be kept subordinate to the higher ideals of ser­vice to the community, faithful execution of one’s duties, and obedience to the rule and to one’s superiors. Christ 50. ​For a remarkable rebuke of singularity, see VCH c. 28, trans., pp. 33–34: when Christina of Hane was given to excessive penitence, a statue of the Virgin slapped her in the face and told her to be “content with what is common,” then Christina prayed to Christ for protection from his m ­ other’s wrath. 51. ​Claire Taylor Jones, Ruling the Spirit: ­Women, Liturgy, and Dominican Reform in Late Medieval Germany (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), 64–69. 52. ​SB Adelhausen, 169–70. 53. ​SB Katharinental, 102; cf. Jones, Ruling the Spirit, 65. 54. ​SB Engelthal, 21–22.

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comes to the ­sisters specifically as a child—­potentially himself a model of obedience to authority—­when he makes and reinforces this lesson. The role of the child Christ as enforcer of obedience appears in a story about an unnamed nun of Katharinental.55 Christ appeared to her in the choir as a child, but then she was summoned to the refectory. She thought, “O Lord, which is dearer to you, that I should be obedient, or that I should be ­here with you?” Reading her mind, Christ replied, “With obedience you find me, and with obedience no one loses me.” So she went as she was ordered, and as a reward for her obedience, the child returned: she arrived at t­ able and again found him sitting by her and playing with her.56 Another ­sister was busy in the work h ­ ouse when the child Christ came to her. An infirm member of the monastery, who had difficulty moving about by herself, came and asked for her help, but the visionary was caught up in her delightful converse with the child and waved the other ­sister away. At once she no longer saw the child. Saddened, she wondered what had caused the withdrawal. Then a voice told her, “It was ­because you did not exercise love. Since you did not agree to do what the s­ ister bade you, on that account you can see me no longer.”57 The compilation is not perfectly consistent, since elsewhere Ite of Hallau is said to have become so absorbed in playing with the child Christ that she neglected the kitchen work she was supposed to be d­ oing. Meal time approached and she panicked at being unprepared, but an angel assured her every­thing would be ready, and somehow it indeed was.58 Presumably she was not punished for her neglect ­because it was a mere oversight. Even so, the text clearly recognizes that visionary absorption and monastic responsibility may clash, and a nun who neglects the latter on account of the former should at least have the good grace to realize the difficulty. Elsewhere in the Katharinental sister-­book a s­ ister had a vision of the child Christ in the elevated host, and it was revealed to her that the vision was given her as a reward for her consoling a novice in her distress.59 Adelheit of Spiegelberg told the child Christ she must leave him “in true obedience” when she was called to the refectory, precisely so that he would never depart from her, and when she sat at ­table, she found him sitting on it before her.60 The child could turn up anywhere in the monastery, at the gate or in the school room as well as 55. ​The remainder of this section for the most part appeared in an e­ arlier form in my article “Ihesus ist unser!: The Christ Child in the German ­Sister Books,” in The Christ Child in Medieval Culture: Alpha es et O!, ed. Mary Dzon and Theresa M. Kenney (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012), 167–98. 56. ​SB Katharinental, 109. 57. ​SB Katharinental, 110–11. 58. ​SB Katharinental, 107–8. 59. ​SB Katharinental, 104–5. 60. ​SB Katharinental, 97–98.

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the chapel.61 But the story of ­Sister Adelheit adds the twist that she must ensure the child Christ’s continued presence precisely by her willingness to forego it. The theme of divine presence is expressed in t­hese stories with the teasing playfulness reminiscent of the mature Bridegroom in the Song of Songs: the child runs about and hides at times u ­ nder the nun’s mantle. The sister-­books occasionally show Christ himself as recipient of the ­sisters’ ser­vice. Adelhait of Frowenberg at Töss wanted to take upon herself a kind of passion out of devotion to Christ’s childhood: she prayed that she might serve him with the martyrdom of all her body: “She wished her skin stripped off to make our Lord swaddling bands, and her veins spun into thread to make him a jacket, and her marrow ground into flour to make him porridge. She wished her blood poured out to make him a bath, and her bones burnt to make him a fire.”62 But this quest of abjection is rare in the sister-­books; the child typically comes as comforter in suffering, not as an occasion for suffering. The sister-­books thus envisage a network of ser­vice: the child Christ serves the ­sisters, the ­sisters serve the child, and the ­sisters serve each other. The child’s presence is sometimes a form of ser­vice, sometimes a reward for ser­vice.

Communities of Intercession Outsiders sometimes tend to think of monasteries in terms of their intercessory function, their role as prayer factories efficiently sending petitions heavenward, beseeching God on behalf of friends and patrons.63 This instrumental view of the monastic community may seem at odds with the role of the monastery as a place for cultivating contemplative prayer and the contemplative life. At Helfta, however, ­there is less tension between ­these ideals, ­because intercession for t­ hose inside and outside the monastery—­and counsel rendered to audiences of both insiders and outsiders—­g rows out of communication with Christ. The nuns frequently pass along to Christ the concerns that have been brought to them, and when Christ speaks to the nuns, he often addresses concerns of and about other p­ eople. When the nuns engage in intercessory prayer, they are often answered by Christ; intercession once again gives rise 61. ​Lothar Zenetti, Das Jesuskind: Verehrung und Darstellung (Munich: Wewel, 1987), 60. 62. ​SB Töss, 52. 63. ​Thomas Merton, “Contemplation in a World of Action,” in Contemplation in a World of Action (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1998), 156, speaks of p­ eople who, seeing God one-­ sidedly as transcendent, constantly send monks requests for prayer in times of trou­ble: “Certainly, Catholics believe that God hears and answers prayers of petition. But it is a distortion of the contemplative life to treat it as if the contemplative concentrated all his efforts on getting graces and ­favors from God for ­others and for himself.”

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to Christophany. B ­ ecause they are turned ­toward Christ on behalf of ­others in their community, the relationship with Christ himself is more fully portrayed than that with their clients, who usually remain somewhat in the shadows. At times we see them more clearly: a supporter of the convent who had often given financial support to Mechthild in her illness feared he had done too ­little and was reluctant to speak with her about the salvation of his soul b­ ecause he was afraid he would burden or tire her.64 On the ­whole, the social dynamics are acknowledged but not fully explicated. Already in Book 3 of Mechthild of Magdeburg’s Flowing Light ­there is reference to interaction with her community, but the theme is more salient in Book 6, written ­after her transfer to Helfta. She prays and receives counsel about the moral status and salvation of t­ hose around her, about a knight who is tempted by lust, about the be­hav­ior of a certain canon, about prob­lems raised by a contrary nun, about the failings of the religious more generally, about the complicated status of the monastic community, and about warfare.65 Christ also gives counsel about ­matters of more general concern, particularly in Book 4: offerings to priests, relations with Jews, and the trou­bles of the Dominican order and its members, which leads to a long prophecy about the afflictions of the Dominican order, the coming of Antichrist, and other tribulations of the end time.66 When Mechthild turns to such ­matters, her focus has shifted clearly from the eternal to the temporal. With Mechthild of Hackeborn prayer becomes even more an interface between mystical experience and social life, between interaction with Christ and engagement with a broader community. She prays for a friend and then sees that friend in Christ’s presence.67 As a privileged emissary to the divine, she offers her fellow nuns’ prayers to Christ. Her role as intercessor is a recurrent theme. Although the occasions are sketched only vaguely, we get a sense that both fellow nuns and laypeople experiencing any sort of difficulty—­fearful of unworthiness and wanting divine reassurance, needing instruction on how to live, or simply troubled in some unspecified way—­would turn to her for mediation.68 Somewhat more specifically, a ­woman is disturbed ­because she 64. ​LDP 3.75.2 (Barratt, 215). 65. ​FLG 3.18, pp. 202–3 (Tobin, 125–26); cf. 3.12, pp. 188–89 (Tobin, 119–20); 6.2–3, pp. 432–37 (Tobin, 228–30); 6.7, pp. 444–47 (Tobin, 233–34); 6.13, pp. 456–59 (Tobin, 238–40); 7.14, pp. 558–59 (Tobin, 286–87); 7.28, pp. 584–87 (Tobin, 298–99); 7.36, pp. 598–603 (Tobin, 305–7); 7.53, pp. 634–37 (Tobin, 321–22). 66. ​FLG 4.9–11, pp. 256–67 (Tobin, 151–52); 4.20–22, pp. 286–93 (Tobin, 164–67); 4.26–27, pp. 298–99 (Tobin, 169–76). 67. ​LSG 1.19 (Newman, 82). 68. ​LSG 1.7 (Newman, 50); 1.6 (Newman, 49); 1.26 (Newman, 99); 1.32 (Newman, 113); 1.35 (Newman, 118); 4.25, pp. 282–84; 4.51, p. 304 (Newman, 187); 4.36, pp. 294–95; 4.40, pp. 298–99 (Newman, 183); 4.52, p. 305 (Newman, 187); 4.41–42, pp. 299–300 (Newman, 183); 4.23, p. 280 (Newman, 171; 4.26,

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fears she is receiving communion unworthily, while another ­woman is so sick that she weeps constantly and is afraid of ­going blind.69 The response is often somewhat conventional and not overtly sympathetic counsel. If a nun is afflicted with illness, Christ’s reaction is, “Why should I not be allowed to dance with my beloved when I w ­ ill?”70 The counsel for a man who is troubled is a reminder of Christ’s own life: when he walked on the path of voluntary poverty, it was narrow and dry, and if the path of virtuous conduct was florid and lined with fruit-­bearing trees, that of the Passion was full of thorns and thistles.71 On hearing that a ­woman is oppressed with sadness, Christ replies, “And why is she troubled? I created her for myself, and I have given myself to her for all that she asks of me. I am a f­ather to her in creation, a m ­ other in redemption, a ­brother in sharing of the Kingdom, and a ­sister in sweet companionship.”72 Rarely are petitions followed by visions. In one exceptional case, Mechthild prays for a person and immediately sees that person standing in a white garment in the presence of Christ, who extends his hand to the person, offering help and strength in all good works—­which reinforces conventional counsel with a ­simple vision.73 ­These revelations are ascribed to Christ, with Mechthild serving only as intermediary, but they contain the sort of wisdom that would have come easily to anyone seasoned in l­ater medieval religious culture, not a level of wisdom that self-­evidently required a divine source. Intercession for Mechthild of Hackeborn is linked to a theology of merit and transfer of merit. The concept of merit transfer is fundamental to some theologies of atonement and to the rationale of indulgences. In Mechthild’s formulation, the notion is that Christ can add to the works of virtue that a person has done and can make up for the works a person has failed to do, just as he can compensate for sinful actions. Mechthild perceives that she has been given remission of all her sins and supplement to all her merits, and in bestowing his own works upon her, he makes up for what she has neglected. When she prays for a person who fears she has been negligent, Christ directs her to pray and to have that person pray that he may make up for what is lacking. And when she prays for a person who takes delight in performing good works, pp. 283–84; 4.31, p. 290; 4.32, pp. 290–91 (Newman, 174–75; 4.28, p. 286; 4.37, p. 296; 4.45, p. 301 (Newman, 184–85). 69. ​LSG 4.48, p. 303 (Newman, 185–86; LSG 4.38, pp. 296–97 (Newman, 175–76). 70. ​LSG 4.30, pp. 287–88 (tripudiare) (Newman, 173–74). 71. ​LSG 4.36, pp. 294f. 72. ​LSG 4.50, p. 304. 73. ​LSG 4.37, p. 296.

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especially menial ones, Christ stretches out his hands and says he bestows all his own works as sanctification and supplement to hers.74 ­Toward the end of Book 3 of the Herald, Gertrude too gives a long series of incidents in which she interceded for vari­ous ­people. They are of interest not only b­ecause they show ways of representing Christ’s presence, but also ­because of the light they shed on relationships within the monastery and between the nuns and their patrons outside it. Gertrude sometimes prays simply for “a certain man” or even “a certain person,” or “vari­ous p­ eople.” Frequently she intercedes for p­ eople who have been commended to her prayer, w ­ hether by themselves or by o ­ thers. When she prays for a w ­ oman who is disturbed b­ ecause of some impatient conversation, or a ­woman wishing for consolation or suffering a temptation, or a w ­ oman who fears she w ­ ill lose a close friend to death, it is not clear w ­ hether the individual is a nun or an outsider. Occasionally she prays for ­people she holds in par­tic­u­lar affection, but she also does so for p­ eople she scarcely knows, as well as for ­people who in one way or other have hurt or offended her. Her prayers may be meant for a sick man, a ­woman injured in an accident, or a faithful male servant of the monastery. In short, she prays for ­people of any and all sorts. Christ’s response to Gertrude’s prayer often involves moral counsel that she is meant to pass along to t­ hose for whom she prays: trou­bles must be borne patiently; temptation should lead to humility; resignation to the divine w ­ ill is rewarded, even if it means accepting responsibilities that leave less time for prayer. The counsel is directed to men as well as to w ­ omen. It is usually conventional wisdom that might just as well be given by Gertrude on her own authority, or by anyone e­ lse, but it obviously carries more weight if it is Christ’s own counsel to someone Gertrude knows and someone who in many cases has come to Gertrude seeking guidance. Somewhat more than the younger Mechthild, whose messages sometimes have a slightly caustic tone, Gertrude conveys sympathetic reassurance: through her, Christ gives affirmation that prayer is heard, that a person is close to Christ, that someone ­will share in Gertrude’s merits. The reassurance is typically directed to someone who is troubled or depressed.75 Clearly ­there w ­ ere many p­ eople commended to Gertrude’s prayer, and she could not be expected to know them all well enough to seek or transmit responses tailor-­made for all their special circumstances. Some of the counsel 74. ​LSG 1.1, pp. 8–9 (Newman, 37–40); 4.23, p. 280 (Newman, 171); 4.34, p. 293. On the theology of merit and its transfer, see Newman’s comments in LSG 20–22. 75. ​LDP 3.70 (Barratt, 196–97); 3.72.4, p. 200; LDP 3.76, p. 217; LDP 3.88, p. 236; LDP 3.72.5, pp.  200–201; 3.73.1–2, pp.  202–3; 3.73.7–8, pp.  205–6; LDP 3.71.1, p.  198; LDP 3.71.2, p.  198; LDP 3.75.1, pp. 214–15; LDP 3.83.1, p. 229.

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she passed along was recycled and even all-­purpose. ­There ­were two persons who had been commended to her prayer, but she did not ­really know them well, so Christ made reference to ­earlier revelations about other individuals, and this counsel could in princi­ple be relevant to “anyone of what­ever religious order or profession.”76 It was Gertrude’s custom, when she began praying for someone, to ask that this person might share in the merits of her own pious works. She once asked Christ what good it does when her prayers are answered but the beneficiaries remain unaware; he replied that it is like a peace a­ fter a long war that is not known at first to t­ hose living at a distance. She complained that Christ seemed not to be hearing her prayer; he replied that in his omnipotence he could do all ­things, but he does not do what is not fitting, and he does not turn t­ hose from evil who do not exert themselves, just as a king does not clean his own stable.77 A modern reader may be reminded of jokes in which God tells someone to meet him halfway and not rely exclusively on divine intervention—­and this passage from Gertrude does have the sharpness of a joke. Elsewhere, however, his response is more lavishly generous: she knew that a certain number of souls had been released from purgatory due to another nun’s prayers, and now she prayed for an advance of grace to an equal number of p­ eople who w ­ ere predestined for salvation but w ­ ere currently sinners, and Christ upbraided her for her timidity, urging that she pray even for souls that ­were destined for damnation, so she did, and they ­were reassigned to the elect.78 This is what liberation from damnation seems to mean for t­ hese w ­ omen: not releasing souls already in hell, but freeing them from predestination to that fate.79 Narratives of prayer sometimes shed light on tensions within community and relations between the nuns and t­ hose outside the convent. Typically the tensions emerged over differing degrees of monastic rigor. Gertrude prayed for two p­ eople who ­were quarreling, one thinking she was upholding justice, while the other thought she was fostering love of neighbor; Christ responded with the analogy of a f­ ather who tolerates his c­ hildren’s slight faults but corrects one who is harsh ­toward another. A nun took it on herself to go about correcting other nuns during the divine office, but as a result she herself was remiss in her devotion; Christ assured Gertrude that if someone forestalls negligence in o ­ thers he himself ­will make up for that person’s own consequent 76. ​LDP 3.73.12–14 (Barratt, 208–9). 77. ​LDP 3.75.1 (Barratt, 214–15); 3.72.1–2, pp. 199–200; 3.83.2, pp. 229–30. 78. ​LDP 3.10.5 (Barratt, 44–45). 79. ​See Barbara Newman, From Virile ­Woman to WomanChrist: Studies in Medieval Religion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), chap. 4, “On the Threshold of the Dead: Purgatory, Hell, and Religious ­Women.”

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failings. A ­woman (presumably a fellow nun) was upset ­after being annoyed at o ­ thers who seemed to be disrupting the religious life and discipline; Christ gave advice about tactful and loving correction of faults. A man (prob­ably a priest) insistent on due preparation for communion had caused some ­people to abstain from the sacrament; Christ said he was like an overly severe tutor who keeps a prince from playing with his beloved low-­born companions.80 The lit­er­a­ture of Helfta thus discloses social tensions, although ­these are more fully set forth in the sister-­books.

Communities Gathered at Deathbeds In the sister-­books as in the lit­er­a­ture from Helfta, Christ appears at death, and the revelation is shared with the other s­ isters. It is clear in the lit­er­a­ture of Helfta that the deathbed scene is a social occasion; while the repre­sen­ta­tion of Christ as recipient of souls is clearer in the lit­er­a­ture of Helfta, the other side of the picture, the ­human reaction and the social interaction, tends to be more explic­itly developed in the sister-­books. A s­ ister lying in extremis ­will tell the o ­ thers gathered at her bedside how Christ has come to her, how he promised she would soon be singing “Gloria in excelsis” in paradise, how he has ­appeared with a green garland that would be hers in heaven, how when one ­sister said the Confiteor, it was Christ who chimed in with the response Misereatur, how he appeared nailed to the cross and urged the d­ ying w ­ oman 81 to imitate his suffering. When a ­sister at Unterlinden was ­dying, she agreed with the  ­sisters who clustered at her deathbed that if Jesus came to meet her, she would indicate his presence by raising a thumb, and when Mary arrived, she would hold out an index fin­ger, but if a throng of angels and saints came she would extend all her fin­gers, and in due course she had occasion to give all these signals as she lay ­dying.82 The social character of mystical experience can be seen clearly in the postmortem visions of the Engelthal nuns: Christ attests before one nun the merits of another who has died, sustaining in death the bond of sympathy and concern that existed in life. When Alheit Ortliben died, Christ appeared to another ­sister in a vision standing over her grave and saying, “Behold, ­there lies the beloved.” A ­ fter Uta of Regensburg died, Christ said of her to another s­ ister that she had followed him in obedience, and when she was afflicted with illness, he 80. ​LDP 3.78.2 (Barratt, 220–21); 3.84, p. 231; 3.78.1, p. 220; 3.77, pp. 218–19, but cf. 3.18.13, p. 76. 81. ​SB Engelthal, pp. 9, 10, 21, 34, 37, 39, 42. 82. ​SB Unterlinden, 382–84. The bonds of community could extend beyond death. The Unterlinden book tells several stories of apparitions; see 446–47, cc. 399, and 440.

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had never been apart from her. When a ­sister prayed for the soul of Elsbet of Waldek, Christ told her he would be gracious to this recently deceased nun, who was like him in never having had a good day on earth. And when a chaplain died, one s­ ister saw Christ and Mary hovering above him with the heavenly host.83 Apparitions of the child Christ in anticipation of a ­sister’s death occur with special frequency in the Engelthal sister-­book, and more often than not the apparition was meant to assure the ­dying nun of her salvation. It might come at a point when death was unexpected: a lay ­sister named Elisabet was in the chapel when Christ appeared to her with a crown in his hand, which he placed on each ­woman in the chapel, then took it away, fi­nally placing it and leaving it on Elisabet, by which she understood that he was about to take her from this world.84 But it might also occur as the convent was gathering at the deathbed: when Hedwig of Regensburg was ­dying, the Virgin and child went in pro­cession with the nuns of the convent, approaching her bed and telling her she would enter into eternal joy, rewarded for all she had suffered.85 The assurance of divine ­favor is usually explicit: Christ would be as favorable t­oward ­these ­sisters as ­toward other holy virgins, their suffering would be rewarded with ­great joy, or they would be “­children of the eternal kingdom.” One might have expected such reassurance to come from the mature Christ, but when the d­ ying nuns are promised they w ­ ill be c­ hildren of the kingdom we can hear an echo of Matthew 18:3, in which being childlike is a condition for entering the kingdom of heaven. In that context it is perhaps fitting that Christ himself is shown as childlike and even playful. Thus, he came to Guet of Ditenhofen playing in the manner of a child and promised to deal favorably with her.86 Fuller and yet more dramatic is in the account of Alheit of Herspruk. She had been told by the Virgin Mary that she would appear to her with her son in her arms when Alheit was about to die. As her death approached, Alheit related that promise to her Engelthal ­sisters. And so it happened. The Virgin and child came to Alheit, telling her she was among the elect, and they would deal graciously with her and appear once more before she died. She told the ­sisters of that apparition, describing where the sacred persons had stood and what they had worn. Again she urged the s­ isters not to miss their presence. On the eve of Palm Sunday, when Saturday was being celebrated in honor of the Virgin, the Lord came into the choir during the “Te deum,” at the verse “Et laudamus nomen tuum in seculum,” and he remained t­here u ­ ntil the chant was finished. 83. ​SB Engelthal, 24, 32, 41. 84. ​SB Engelthal, 40. 85. ​SB Engelthal, 22. 86. ​SB Engelthal, 24.

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Then the entire convent bowed to him, without seeing him—­except for the prioress, who did see him. Then he went out of the choir and into the infirmary, as promised. Alheit called out, “Our Lord has come, and his dear m ­ other Mary!” All the ­women fell prostrate ­toward him and asked their ­sister to pray for the convent. Then she went into rapture and spoke with Christ, but the ­sisters could hear only her side of the dialogue. When she came back to herself, they asked her if she had besought anything for the convent, and she said he had given a blessing over them all. With that, she died a holy death.87 The account centers on the individual, but the community is emphatically meant to be pre­sent and to participate in the reward bestowed on that individual. Repeatedly and insistently, then, the sister-­books show the significance of communal bonding, the sharing in communal culture, and communal participation in the blessings given to an individual precisely at the moment when the situation might have suggested a turning away from community and ­toward the final absorption of the individual into eternity. What Anna Harrison says of Helfta applies broadly to other convents: “It was not only a question of the community’s living members continuing to be connected to dead members of the community. The convent appears to be in two places at once, or as if the two convents—­earthly and celestial—­were integrated, at least in Mechtild’s visions.”88

Communities Interceding for Souls in Purgatory As we have seen, the lit­er­a­ture of Helfta is deeply concerned with ongoing links between the community and par­tic­u­lar members who, even in death, ­whether in purgatory or in heaven, retain their bonds to the community they have left b­ ehind. In l­ater generations the emphasis falls rather more on anonymous throngs of souls in purgatory and on the common fate that they share, not on the par­tic­u­lar needs of deceased individuals. The shift may have come at least partly b­ ecause the l­ater Dominican communities of the sister-­books ­were dependent on urban patronage and in more regular contact with communities close at hand, and thus with large numbers of individuals and families, than the ­sisters of Helfta. Late medieval Christians ­were famously apprehensive about suffering in purgatory; indulgences, mass endowments, and testamentary bequests ­were among the means taken to reduce the length of that suffering. Partic­ul­ ar saints, such as Saint Leonard, w ­ ere thought of as effective at rescuing 87. ​SB Engelthal, 15–16. 88. ​Harrison, “Thousands and Thousands of Lovers,” 159.

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souls from purgatory.89 Intercessory prayer for ­these souls was also widely cultivated, and in our sources Christ often directs the living to pray for the dead. Friedrich Sunder and Adelheid Langmann of Engelthal both served as g­ reat benefactors of the souls in purgatory, and one f­ avor that Christ repeatedly bestowed on them was the release of a certain number of souls from purgatorial suffering, along with a corresponding number of sinners converted on earth and pious souls confirmed in their goodness. In Sunder’s case the number ranged from fifty to a thousand souls in each category. By the next generation, in Langmann’s time, the number was greatly inflated, to four thousand at least, usually thirty thousand, even one hundred thousand. On one occasion Langmann asked Christ why he was so fond of the number thirty and its multiples; he reminded her that he had been betrayed for thirty pieces of silver. The numerical piety of the late medieval West can be found elsewhere in ­these sources, but nowhere more than in t­ hese inventories of souls.90 When Sunder was sick and unable to say mass for some period, the souls in purgatory became clamorous with concern about their friend and helper whose masses gave them g­ reat comfort. His guardian angel assured the souls that he was alive but ailing, and he urged them to ask the Virgin to intercede on his behalf with Christ to secure his recovery. The Virgin approached Christ about the ­matter, and even though Christ had already promised Sunder release from earthly life, he agreed to let the priest live a while longer out of consideration for his ­mother’s entreaties. This baroque variation on the double intercession gives some notion of how complex the revelations might become, although the dominant theme is always encounter with Christ himself. Intercession for the souls in purgatory was a ­matter of profound concern for Dorothea of Montau, who criticized Johannes Marienwerder for neglecting ­these souls, paying them less attention than ­those still alive. Among the longer and more vivid sections from the Book of Feast Days is that devoted to All Souls’ Day. Christ told Dorothea to pray for the souls in purgatory. The souls themselves came out of purgatory and stood around her, wanting her prayer, one of them famished, another dried out, another burned from heat, 89. ​Albert Deibele, St Leonhard in Schwäbisch Gmünd und die ihm angeschlossenen Pflegen: Geschichte und Verzeichnis der Urkunden, Akten und Bände, mit einem Anhang über die Dreifaltigkeitskapelle, Michaelskapelle und den St. Salvator: 1323 bis zur Gegenwart (Schwäbisch Gmünd: Stadtarchiv, 1971). 90. ​Philipp Strauch, Die Offenbarungen der Margaretha Ebner und der Adelheid Langmann, trans. Josef Prestel (Weimar: Böhlau, 1939), 25; Thomas Lentes, “Counting Piety in the Late ­Middle Ages,” in Ordering Medieval Society: Perspectives on Intellectual and Practical Modes of Shaping Social Relations, ed. Bernhard Jussen (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 57; Rachel Fulton, “Praying by Numbers,” Studies in Medieval and Re­nais­sance History, ser. 3, vol. 4 (2007): 195–250. Christ told Mechthild of Hackeborn to say the Ave Maria 277 times, for each day he was in the Virgin’s womb: LSG 1.29 (Newman, 104).

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another contracted with cold, another reduced almost to nothing with torments. Christ told her to tell her confessor that, being too attached to transitory ­things that he could see, he was too ­little heedful of ­things invisible. In general, priests tend to cultivate care for ­those suffering on earth more than aid for the souls in purgatory, who are not seen and not consoled by the ministry and aid of anyone. ­Those few who do attend to the souls in purgatory and ­free them from their pains do more good than if they gathered ­great riches and distributed them to the poor. Christ showed her purgatory and its punishments and revealed the la­men­ta­ble clamor of souls in punishment. Among other receptacles of souls she saw something like a ­g reat frying pan with boiling ­water, in which souls ­were given final purification before entering into heaven. For seven weeks thereafter, nearly e­ very day she heard the clamor of souls in purgatory.91 Many who ­were freed from purgatory by her prayer remained locked u ­ nder the seal of silence, but she saw the souls of her ­father and m ­ other, her husband, her siblings, and a w ­ oman who was her lodger many years when she had own home. Three times one day the soul of one relative came to her in her cell as to a refuge; she was tormented by demons and asked Dorothea’s prayer, recalling how they once talked joyfully and worked together, and she now hoped Dorothea would urge Christ to remember the deeds she had done for him. Dorothea knew the ­woman was assailed by demons, who would not allow her to be t­ here with her for long. She prayed all the more fervently, but the soul came back asking again for prayer. When the w ­ oman no longer came 92 back, Dorothea knew she had attained peace. Once again we find a complex relationship between the ordinary and the exceptional: Gertrude’s sense of remaining in contact with departed s­ isters and Dorothea’s concern for the souls in purgatory may have differed in degree of intensity from the preoccupation of ordinary late medieval Christians with the suffering they and their ­family and friends would face in purgatory. Gertrude, Dorothea, and ­others may at some point have gone beyond quantitative difference and become qualitatively distinct in their concerns, at least when they claimed visionary revelation of what was happening to ­people in the afterlife. But even so their purgatorial piety was grounded in that of the culture surrounding them, and in turn they ratified and reinforced that culture.

91. ​LdF cc. 122–26, pp. 204–24; c. 122, pp. 205–6; 122, pp. 206–07; c. 123, p. 208; 123, p. 209. Cf. Anneke B. Mulder-­Bakker, The Dedicated Spiritual Life of Upper Rhine Noble ­Women: A Study and Translation of a Fourteenth-­Century Spiritual Biography of Gertrude Rickeldey of Ortenberg and Heilke of Staufenberg (Turnhout: Brepols, 2017), c. 19, 189–95. 92. ​LdF c. 124, p. 209; c. 124, p. 210.

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Conclusion The texts we are dealing with are unusual in the degree to which they give a picture not only of saintly individuals but of a sacred community. To be sure, the notion of sacred place was of long standing, and saints had always to some degree sanctified the places where they lived and w ­ ere buried, but now to a far greater degree we read narratives of multiple individuals living in community, exemplifying its ideals, and manifesting the sacred aura of the community as such. One of the clearest signs of that sacred character is the portrayal of Christ himself as a regular visitor and indeed practically a member of the community. Of course he can be a member of many communities si­mul­ta­ neously, as he can be pre­sent in countless hosts on many altars. But this universal presence always tends ­toward the particularity of presence in this place, interaction with this community, in this set of circumstances. He enters from eternity into time, space, and also place. Even when he interacts privately with one member of a community, his d­ oing so has implications for the entire convent, and often ­those implications become thematized in stories of his presence to the community as such.

C h a p te r   9

Christ as Disciplinarian, Bridegroom, and Teacher in the Life of Dorothea of Montau

At one point in her hagiographic dossier, when Dorothea of Montau has entered an anchoress’s cell, Christ tells her, “Say to your confessor that he may legitimately, securely, and truly say regarding you that you have such perfect confidence in me that you cannot nurture any concern regarding perishable ­things,” and so forth.1 Her confessor and hagiographer Johannes Marienwerder knew of this revelation ­because Dorothea had told him. He was meant to report this message to o ­ thers in the community who ­were concerned about and perhaps critical of Dorothea; indeed, this entire section of the vita envisages curious and critical observers. We thus have Marienwerder saying what Dorothea has said that Christ has said about what she should say to Marienwerder regarding what he should say about her, in response to what ­others ­were saying. ­Here and in many other passages, the text reveals a mesh of remembered and anticipated, reconstructed and preconstructed speech. Amid ­these multiple layers of discourse, however, t­ here is only one explicit speaking role, that of Christ. Through much of the vita, Christ speaks to Dorothea, and she says ­little. What­ever role Dorothea herself or her hagiographer had in constructing the discourse, it is given in the text as constructed mainly by Christ, who allows or dictates brief lines to o ­ thers but himself speaks to Dorothea in vernacular address that is reported in the 1. ​VDM 5.9.d, pp. 225–26; cf. LDM 3.6, pp. 155–56. 283

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text as complex and often sustained Latin monologue.2 That ascription to Christ obscures what for us must be the obvious question: Whose voice are we ­really hearing, or perhaps rather who has taken the leading role in molding the reported communication? It is not by mere chance that Dorothea has occurred several times already in this book. Of all the figures we are discussing, t­here is none who so fully exemplifies virtually all the themes we are exploring. Her life and her hagiographic dossier hold par­tic­u­lar interest ­because the rec­ord is so extensive, ­because it is focused so much on Christophany, and b­ ecause it explic­itly raises crucial questions about experience of Christ’s presence. John Coakley has discussed the vari­ous ways ­women outside of monasteries lived ­under the close supervision of male confessors and spiritual advisers who might become their hagiographers, the ways t­ hese w ­ omen and their confessors related to each other, how far their complementary claims to authority ­were balanced, ­whether they saw their roles as collaborative, and ­whether the clerical supervisors found it necessary to certify that the ­women’s revelations ­were genuine. What the rich dossier for Dorothea makes clear is that the collaboration is portrayed as involving not two but three main individuals—­the saintly ­woman, the clerical confidant, and Christ—­and the role of Christ tends h ­ ere to obscure that of the other two. We may think we hear Dorothea’s voice or Marienwerder’s, but according to the text it is Christ’s voice that is conveyed. The question, then, becomes how far we can distinguish w ­ hether it is Dorothea or Marienwerder who is speaking with Christ’s voice. In general, Dorothea’s hagiographic corpus must be seen as a collaboration between her and Marienwerder: she told him her experience, and he gave it the proper hagiographic formulation. But that collaboration need not always have worked in the same way. The vitae for Dorothea focus very largely on three themes, and in them Christ appears in three distinct modes: he is the stern disciplinarian who regulates and even micromanages the quotidian particularities of her life, which are given with concrete specificity and variety; he is her mystical bridegroom, with whom she has a tortured relationship that is highly repetitive and largely formulaic; and he is her instructor, from whom she learns lessons of vari­ous kinds. The presence of Christ can be manifested in vari­ous ways, but in Dorothea’s case a single ­woman shows three significantly dif­fer­ent and complementary modes of that presence. When Christ is an overseer in Dorothea’s quotidian life, the account is filled with detailed par2. ​For a complementary approach to the interaction of speakers, focused on the German life, see Franziska Küenzlen, “Sprechen und Sprecher in Das Leben der heiligen Dorothea des Johannes Marienwerder,” Oxford German Studies 39 (2010): 160–80. The Unterlinden sister-­book also mentions a ­sister who reported that Christ spoke lingua theuthonica (SB Unterlinden, 265).



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ticulars that serve no clear hagiographic purpose and prob­ably represent Dorothea’s voice more than Marienwerder’s. Frequently it is the voice of Dorothea’s conscience that seems to be recognized as that of Christ. When the text turns t­oward theoerotic themes ­there is a more ste­reo­typical quality to the report. Dorothea begins to sound somewhat more like other mystically inclined w ­ omen, with comparable experiences expressed in the standard language of bridal mysticism. The mystical themes h ­ ere come mostly from the traditional lit­er­a­ture of theoerotic mysticism that Marienwerder knew well, and his voice is surely the stronger, even if Dorothea would have assented to his formulations. When Christ is an instructor, both Dorothea and Marien­ werder had interests to uphold, albeit dif­fer­ent interests, and in ­those passages ­there is perhaps the greatest collaboration between the two. The paradox ­here is that for Dorothea the ordinary is exceptional, and the exceptional is ordinary. Her ordinary, everyday life is suffused with spiritual meaning ­because she encounters Christ at e­ very turn and has him regulate her activities in detail. The particulars often lend a sense of lively specificity. Her bridal relationship with Christ, however, even at its most intense, is formulaic to the point of seeming routine. ­These two chief modes in which she encounters Christ both require exploration, as does the yet more complicated mode in which she is instructed by Christ. But first the circumstances of her relationship with Marienwerder must be sketched.

Dorothea of Montau and Johannes Marienwerder Dorothea of Montau was born in 1347 at Groß Montau in Prus­sia, where she lived for her first sixteen years, emulating her m ­ other’s piety from an early age. In her adolescence she was married to a swordsmith named Adalbrecht, who abused her and had l­ittle sympathy for her spiritual enthusiasms.3 During her married life she lived at Gdansk or Danzig. (Marienwerder’s Latin text shifts to the vernacular to give the place name as Gdanczg, which comes closer to the modern Polish than to the German designation.) By 1383 eight of their nine ­children had died, the one surviving was sent off to a nunnery at an early age, and Dorothea was f­ree to go on pilgrimage to Aachen, Einsiedeln, Köslin, and Rome, sometimes with her husband and sometimes by herself. While she was on pilgrimage to Rome in 1389–1390 for the Jubilee year, her husband died. What­ever reputation she had locally during her husband’s life, her status at Gdansk was not improved: she gained notoriety for laughing and singing in her 3. ​VDM 2.27–31, 2.41; cf. LDM 2.15, pp. 100–102.

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parish church, for which she was denounced for “heresy,” cited before an episcopal official, and threatened, however seriously, with burning at the stake.4 Her longtime confessor was no longer allowed to administer weekly communion to her. He advised Dorothea to go to the town of Marienwerder, where he said she would find a spiritually minded man, Johannes Marienwerder (1343– 1417), a professor of theology who had recently moved ­there ­after teaching at Prague and had become a canon at the cathedral.5 She moved in 1391 to the town of Marienwerder, where she met Johannes Marienwerder. At once she bonded with him and revealed the secrets of her life to him. He thought it would be good to consult another learned and experienced man about all this and selected Johannes Ryman, the cathedral dean. The two clerics examined her repeatedly about her experiences and agreed to serve as her guardians.6 In 1393 she became a recluse in a cell attached to the local cathedral.7 While she was thus enclosed, Christ was “compelled” to be her neighbor.8 She died the following year, at age forty-­seven, but for the final months of her life she and her clerical advisers agreed that she was best kept enclosed in her cell, as she wished.9 According to the vitae, she willingly recognized the authority of Marien­ werder and Ryman. Christ commanded her to take a vow that she would never depart from her confessor, and it was as if she was bound to him in matrimony. She and Marienwerder should have a single ­will, his rather than hers; she should 4. ​Dyan Elliott, “Authorizing a Life: The Collaboration of Dorothea of Montau and John Marienwerder,” in Gendered Voices: Medieval Saints and Their Interpreters, ed. Catherine Mooney (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 187–88. 5. ​On Dorothea and Johannes Marienwerder, see Ute Stargardt,” Male Clerical Authority in the Spiritual (Auto)Biographies of Medieval W ­ omen,” in ­Women as Protagonists and Poets in the German ­Middle Ages: An Anthology of Feminist Approaches to M ­ iddle High German Lit­er­at­ ure, ed. Albrecht Classen (Göppingen: Kümmerle, 1991), 209–38; Ute Stargardt,” Whose Life Is This Anyway? Johannes von Marienwerder’s Narrative Strategies in the German Vita of Dorothea von Montau,” Michigan Academician: Papers of the Michigan Acad­emy of Science, Arts, and Letters 27 (1994): 39–56. 6. ​VDM 3.27.e, p. 149; 3.28.g, p. 151. 7. ​On the phenomenon of female enclosure more broadly see Edith Pasztor, “L’eremitismo femminile (secoli XII–­XV),” in Donne e sante: Studi sulla religioisità femminile nel Medio Evo, ed. Edith Pasztor (Rome: Studium, 2000), 65–96. 8. ​VDM 5.14.e, p. 233. 9. ​On Dorothea of Montau generally, see Richard Kieckhefer, Unquiet Souls: Fourteenth-­Century Saints and Their Religious Milieu (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 22–33; Petra Hörner, Dorothea von Montau: Überlieferung, Interpretation: Dorothea und die osteuropäische Mystik (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1993); Cordelia Hess, Heilige machen im spätmittelalterlichen Ostseeraum: Die Kanonisationsprozesse von Birgitta von Schweden, Nikolaus von Linköping und Dorothea von Montau (Berlin: Akademie, 2008); Ute Stargardt, “Dorothy of Montau,” in Medieval Holy ­Women in the Christian Tradition, c. 1100–­c. 1500, ed. Alastair Minnis and Rosalynn Voaden (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010), 475–96; Almut Suerbaum and Annette Volfing, eds., Dorothea von Montau and Johannes Marienwerder: Constructions of Sanctity, a special issue of Oxford German Studies 39, no. 2 (2010): 108–212; and David Wallace, Strong W ­ omen: Life, Text, and Territory, 1347–1645 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 1–60.



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­ umble herself before him and open the secrets of her heart to him. If he comh manded her to speak, she should speak; if he ordered silence, she should be ­silent. Marienwerder had chief responsibility for deciding when she could receive communion. When she was enclosed in her cell, Marienwerder alone was to have the key, so no one could approach her without his permission.10 Enclosure was something she had long yearned for and then celebrated, and it provided what she viewed as a safe space, but it also put her ­under the firm control of two men, Marienwerder and Christ, each in his own way strict and resolute. Within three years of her death Marienwerder had written two letters about Dorothea and two vitae. In 1397 he penned a Liber de festis (Book of feast days”) telling of revelations she had that w ­ ere focused on days in the church year. The fullest and in many ways most in­ter­est­ing document, known simply as the Vita latina (Latin Life), came in 1398. Then Marienwerder wrote the Septililium, a treatise about her experiences of mystical love, in 1400, and by 1404 a German life. The Latin Life is especially impor­tant not just ­because it is the longest account of Dorothea’s life but b­ ecause it gives the fullest and most revealing insight into the way she experienced the presence of Christ. When it tells of Dorothea’s ­later years, it makes the outer circumstances of her life into a framework for a constant stream of revelatory experience. More surprisingly, when it tells of her early years, before she had begun to receive ­these revelations, they are still in the forefront, ­because much of what she remembered and told about ­those early years was what Christ recalled to her memory. Not only is the vita replete with revelations from Christ, but the first of the text’s seven books is primarily a disquisition on the nature and significance of t­ hese revelations. Dorothea appears in Marienwerder’s account as a ­woman deeply preoccupied with her own thoughts, constantly engrossed in reviewing the past and previewing ­future situations, so concerned about the impression she makes on ­others that she plays out in her mind how she w ­ ill represent herself to them. She enjoys bursts of insight about every­thing that concerns her, and she ascribes that insight to Christ, phrasing what she has discerned as direct discourse from his mouth. Marienwerder and Dorothea w ­ ere agreed that Christ was in fact the source of the insight and its precise formulation. Still, in the text itself the revelations are usually—­not always—­shown as received by the inner senses and as relating closely to the circumstances of Dorothea’s life, and this characterization of the revelations is consistent with a reading of Dorothea as a vigorously intuitive personality whose intuitions have as their primary subject ­matter a sense of Christ as their source. 10. ​VDM 3.28.h, p. 151; 1.6.m, p. 44; 4.19.d, p. 177; 5.6.k, p. 220; cf. 1.6.n, p. 44; 5.39.e, p. 275.

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The passage from her vita cited above, with its intricate layering of dialogue, provides a key to impor­tant dimensions of her life. The hagiographic corpus gives the impression of a sharp distinction between foreground and background. Dorothea herself, Johannes Marienwerder, and Christ (often accompanied by his ­mother) are the characters regularly in the foreground of her drama. All other characters remain in the background, mentioned as they impinge upon her experience but usually unnamed, and with no effort to suggest their own narratives or viewpoints. The cathedral dean, Johannes Ryman, a friend of Marienwerder, stood by Marienwerder as one of Dorothea’s “sons” but soon was called off to serve at the headquarters of the German Order some twenty-­ five miles away, and he plays only a supporting role in the account. Her husband appears on stage sometimes as an abuser and sometimes as a traveling companion, but what he is ­doing other­wise remains obscure. All nine of their ­children remain in the shadows. Neighbors, friends, Dorothea’s m ­ other, characters Dorothea meets in church or on pilgrimage, and ­those anticipated critics to whom Christ responds, likewise play minor roles at most. No doubt the impression of Dorothea as a loner was, as Stephen Mossman has argued, a construct, and one belied by the depositions in her canonization proceedings.11 But it was not necessarily just Marienwerder’s construct. It would not have detracted from his support of her cult to show her more actively involved with ­those around her. Instead, she comes across as a w ­ oman who might be in the world but was decidedly not of it. That aloofness may still have been something Marienwerder emphasized, for what­ever reason, but it was prob­ably true to her character. She seems to have been socially awkward, shunning communal entertainments even as a child.12 She may have been surrounded by ­others, but she prob­ably did not think in ­those terms. If she had, it would have been difficult to erase them so much from the story. Within the tight ménage à trois in the foreground are two distinct relationships with clearly differing dynamics, that with Marienwerder and that with Christ. During the brief period at the end of her life when he took her ­under his wing, Marienwerder was steadily devoted to and supportive of Dorothea, and they kept their strongly affective bond scrupulously within the bounds of propriety. On his own account he comes across as a stable presence b­ ecause of his level temperament and determination. Dorothea’s relationship with Christ, on the other hand, was highly volatile, and her flamboyantly emotional bond with him required no pretense of propriety. He loved her as passionately as she loved 11. ​Stephen Mossman, “Dorothea von Montau and the Masters of Prague,” Oxford German Studies 39 (2010): 110; Richard Stachnik, ed., Die Akten des Kanonisationsprozesses Dorotheas von Montau von 1394 bis 1521 (Cologne and Vienna: Böhlau, 1978). 12. ​VDM 2.12, pp. 75–76.



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him, but his love was a source as much of torment as of comfort and exhilaration. T ­ oward the end of her life she might have found that she had exchanged one abusive husband for another, but in Christ’s case the torment was part of a complex relationship in which the agony and the ecstasy ­were one. The relationship between Dorothea and Marienwerder was clearly one of deep affection. She often told Marienwerder that she knew the secrets of his heart, including the degree of his fondness for her, which he acknowledged as true. He said to himself that if he ­were ­free from his vow of religion he would willingly change places for her sake, if that ­were necessary, so he could serve her for God’s sake and be consoled by all the graces God bestowed on her.13 Noticing how she took plea­sure in Marienwerder’s com­pany, she wanted to tell him that if he grew weary of her, he should compel her to leave him. Christ said no, she should not say this to Marienwerder, but if he should happen to give her this or any other command, she should obey him.14 She was at times anxious about Marienwerder. She had a vision of his guardian angel, who seemed too far away from him.15 Christ said she should tell him he was neglecting other duties by spending too much time hearing confessions, in par­tic­u­lar ­those of ­women, and two ­women especially, who seemed ­little improved by their confession and might be better instructed by preaching. She realized she herself might be a source of impediment; if hearing her confession kept him from devotion or from mass, he should feel f­ree to put her off u ­ ntil ­after mass, or even the next day. He should leave time for devotion, prayer, and cele­bration of mass, and in attending to the salvation of ­others, he should not neglect his own.16 Prayer would lead him closer to Christ himself and would bring him to know the joys of heaven and the pains of purgatory.17 While Dorothea lived in the narrow confines of her enclosure and focused her attention on a tight social circle, she was aware of a much wider world as one on which she meant, or was meant, to have impact through written rec­ ord of her revelations. It was Christ himself who instigated Dorothea and Marienwerder to publicize what he had told her.18 She and Marienwerder undertook the proj­ect of recording scarcely two years before her death,19 between the time she moved to Marienwerder and her entry into the cell. During this interval t­ here was no appropriate place for them do this recording except 13. ​VDM 1.6.k, p. 43. 14. ​VDM 4.25.h, p. 190. 15. ​LdF c. 116, p. 197. 16. ​LdF c. 82, pp. 139–40. 17. ​LdF c. 122, p. 206. 18. ​VDM 4.10.f, p. 167; 4.20.b, p. 179; 4.36.e, pp. 204–5. 19. ​VDM 1.7.a, pp. 49–50.

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sitting together in church. To avoid suspicions and rumors, they could not work in a private room or even a secluded corner of church. Marienwerder knew full well that spiritual men had a reputation for carnal failings,20 and his instinct leaned t­oward caution. He would write with a stylus on sheets of wax, which he covered up with his surplice lest passersby happen to notice what they w ­ ere ­doing, and l­ater he would transfer the rec­ord to paper. Once she accidentally said something to a layman, giving him a hint that her confessor had written something she had said, but then she prudently changed the subject; Marienwerder learned of the slip and reproached her for her incaution, but Christ assured her he would keep them safe.21 Still, the purpose was eventual publication in carefully edited form, with subdivisions indicated by pointing maniculae in the margins. When she died, the confessor and dean would be able to pre­sent the rec­ord of her revelations to the cathedral canons as evidence of her exceptional life.22 Meanwhile ­there was ­little time for writing, ­because Dorothea was occupied in prayer and contemplation, while Marienwerder had other responsibilities. Sometimes p­ eople interrupted them. Sometimes the winter was so cold that the ink in Marienwerder’s pen froze as he sat writing beside her.23 When Marienwerder exhausted himself with work on his transcription in the eve­ning as well as in the daytime, Christ had Dorothea assure him, “I am not g­ oing to die soon, so do not wear yourself out so much—­I am afraid you ­will harm yourself!”24 And yet, when Christ began revealing more and greater ­things than before, he commanded that they should not rest, and Marienwerder should devote himself to their recording and not be so preoccupied with outward m ­ atters.25 At times she was reticent and preferred that certain memories remain private.26 The reticence was itself a sign of authenticity, b­ ecause it showed she was not seeking publicity. The transition from forgetting to remembering and then from memory to disclosure was gradual and to some degree painful. The pro­cess can be seen already in Book 2, which deals with her early years. Christ reminded her, looking back at her youth, how he had drawn her with charity to know, contemplate, love, and adhere to him.27 She had resolved to tell no one of the disciplines she exercised in youth, although ­those close to her often inquired about them. But then a few months before her death her confes20. ​VDM 1.7.b, p. 50. 21. ​VDM 1.7.d, pp. 50–51. 22. ​VDM 1.7.n, p. 52; 4.18.e, p. 176. 23. ​VDM 5.23.a, p. 247. 24. ​VDM 1.7.e, p. 51. 25. ​VDM 1.7.f, p. 51. 26. ​VDM 1.6.b, p. 41. 27. ​VDM 2.3.a–­b, p. 67.



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sors prevailed upon her to disclose her early life as a way of inciting ­others to devotion, so she consulted Christ. He not only authorized the telling but brought the w ­ hole of her life from girlhood onward back to memory, causing her to learn ­things about herself that she had not known. Still she held it all tightly in her hands, unable to open up, and if God did not put words in her mouth, her experience would remain concealed.28 Dorothea often said to Marienwerder, on command from Christ, that he should not think she had made up or thought up the revelations; rather, she had Christ himself within her, directly placing words in her mouth and speaking through her, so when Marienwerder heard them from her, he was receiving them from Christ. Sometimes she had no idea in advance what she was ­going to say to Marienwerder, and if it w ­ ere not for Christ’s intervention, she would have nothing to say.29 Frequently Christ is reported speaking in long and complex Latin sentences.30 The Latinate diction is clearly Marienwerder’s reworking of what Dorothea had said in the vernacular, traces of which occasionally appear.31 It seems likely that Dorothea spoke a Low German dialect, although she came from a linguistic border region and prob­ably had passive knowledge of East M ­ iddle German (a High German language), while Johannes Marienwerder would have spoken primarily the East M ­ iddle German dialect of his hometown and might have had 28. ​VDM 2.14.a–­c, p. 77; 2.15.a, p. 77; 2.16.c, p. 78; cf. 2.15.a–­b, p. 78. Margaret Ebner also relived past experience as she recorded it, but it is not clear that she had previously forgotten them; see Barbara Koch, “Margaret Ebner,” in Medieval Holy W ­ omen in the Christian Tradition, c. 1100–­c. 1500, ed. Alastair Minnis and Rosalynn Voaden (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010), p. 404. 29. ​VDM 1.7.h, p. 51. 30. ​E.g., VDM 5.9.l, 5.24.c, 5.32.g, 5.34.d, 5.49.d. 31. ​Her revelations came in her own German (VDM 1.4.l, p. 39); cf. his own prose (e.g. 2.38.g, p. 105). Marienwerder occasionally gives the German exclamation ach, leaving it in the vernacular: “Ach, what ­shall I repay the Lord for all he has paid me?” or “Ach, homo dilecte. . . . ​O ve et iterum ve! . . . ​Ach, homo praedilecte . . . ​Ach homo praedilecte” (5.44.a, p. 280; cf. 5.47.b, p. 285; LdF c. 43, p. 74; c. 79, p. 134; c. 93, p. 163). Occasionally even the Latin shows traces of the vernacular underlay, when “my acting” and “your speaking” are rendered with the infinitive. When Christ says to Dorothea, “My acting in you far overwhelms your speaking,” he is using the infinitive as the nominative gerund, which is normal in Latin, but modified with a possessive adjective, which would be more expected in German (1.7.i, p. 51, “Vincit siquidem in te meum agere tuum dicere multum late”; cf. 4.1.d, p. 153; when Christ tells her in LdF c. 116, p. 195, that she cannot fully comprehend her own life and action, the Latin “tuam vitam et tuum agere” again prob­ably rests on a German verb such as handeln used as a gerund. Frequently Marienwerder uses suo videre for “as she saw t­ hings” (LdF c. 53, p. 86; c. 98, pp. 170 and 171; c. 121, p. 204; c. 123, p. 208; c. 130, p. 22), which one might take as based on a vernacular expression similar to the modern German seines Erachtens, and that may be the case, but it was found in Latin usage outside Germany; see, for example, Laura Ackerman Smoller, The Saint and the Chopped-­Up Baby: The Cult of Vincent Ferrer in Medieval and Early Modern Eu­rope (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014), 103, n85 (suo videre non haberet vitam). For a parallel in Mechthild of Magdeburg, see Ernst Hellgardt, “Latin and the Vernacular: Mechthild of Magdeburg—­Mechthild of Hackeborn—­Gertrude of Helfta,” in A Companion to Mysticism and Devotion in Northern Germany in the Late M ­ iddle Ages, ed. Elizabeth Andersen (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 138.

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passive knowledge of Low German.32 ­There is no hint in the hagiography that they had difficulty understanding each other, but their personal bond and even mutual attraction was that of individuals who differed in gender, in social and educational status, in position within the Church, and also in language.

The Presence of Christ as Disciplinarian in Daily Life To an exceptional degree, the accounts by Marienwerder show Dorothea as marked by a piety deeply enmeshed with all the minute particulars of life: her constant round of devotions, her ways of eating, her social relations. In all ­these ­matters, not only did she have a sense that Christ was with her, but she saw him governing her ­every action. T ­ here was always a correct way to arrange t­ hings, and following it was a ­matter of obligation. This constant preoccupation with and scrupulous attention to the sacredness of the quotidian exceeded the normal expectations of hagiography and prob­ably does give a faithful sense of her character. No doubt Christ’s close regulation of her life served to sacralize what might other­wise have been mundane, but with the heavy weight of sacred duty. To be sure, a ­woman living the monastic life could also experience Christ’s presence amid quotidian activities. In the revelations of Adelheid Langmann (1306–1375) the occasion for spiritual intervention can be ordinary to the point of banality. She finds her vegetables are no longer fresh, but Christ urges her to eat them anyway. She is too sick to go to her lessons one day, so Christ fills in for her. A relative offends her, and she fears she is being abandoned by all, including Christ, but he reassures her. She extends a ­favor to someone, and Christ chastises her for having a friend other than himself. She is called to the refectory at meal time, and she knows she w ­ ill be in trou­ble if she tarries, but Christ persuades her to prefer his com­pany even at the risk of discipline. The nuns are eating late on one occasion, and lamps are lit, reminding her of a late night wedding feast, and when a lamp is lit for her, she sees herself as the bride, the spouse of Christ. It is not just the liturgy that opens her spiritual senses, although that is often the case. Every­thing that happens becomes potentially a trigger for her delicately active imagination, by which she perceives spiritual presence whose real­ity she would never question.33 In most of ­these cases, 32. ​Küenzlen, “Sprechen und Sprecher in Das Leben der Heiligen Dorothea,” 161. 33. ​Philipp Strauch, ed., Die Offenbarungen der Adelheid Langmann, Klosterfrau zu Engelthal (Strasbourg: Trübner, 1878), 10–14, 23–28.



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however, the experience of Christ’s presence is in one way or other a catalyst for some form of social interaction. The focus is not narrowly on Adelheid and Christ. In this regard Dorothea of Montau represents an extreme case. E ­ very moment of her everyday life could be an epiphany. More than Langmann, Dorothea was on notice that she lived constantly in Christ’s presence, constantly guided and aided by him, constantly u ­ nder obligation to his specific w ­ ill, and constantly u ­ nder his inexorable judgment. Living according to a strict and even extreme form of divine command ethics, she was accountable not only to moral norms binding for all, but also to demands made specifically upon her. Dorothea’s preoccupation with everyday life is on the face of it unexpected, ­because she was habitually abstracted from her environment. Forgetful of all outward t­hings, on Marienwerder’s telling, Dorothea was preoccupied with Christ alone. She had trou­ble cooking meals for her husband. When Christ led her to church, she saw nothing along the way, and when she arrived, she had no idea how or by what route she had gotten t­ here. At t­ able she was caught up in contemplation and then did not know clearly what she had been eating, or how much, or where or with whom, w ­ hether in time or in eternity. When it was freezing cold, Christ had to command her to put on her mantle and cloak.34 When she did attend to the world about her, she did so in strictly regulated ways. Christ issued not just detailed instructions but commands on how to lie down and sit up, how to stand and walk, in general how to behave. He might command her to go to t­ able, to hear preaching, to speak, to pray, to sprinkle the earth and p­ eople with her tears, to pray for ­those killed on a Lithuanian crusade, and to do other par­tic­u­lar acts. He ordered her to refuse offerings beyond what she strictly needed. Most especially he prescribed how she should eat. He sustained her with less and less food, but enough for her bodily needs. He was par­tic­u­lar about what types of food she should eat, and how she should meditate while at ­table. He gave her a set of rules to be observed while she lived in her cell: where she should have a win­dow, where she should keep a crucifix, how she should receive monetary offerings. She should think of nothing as her own, not even a shroud in which her body could be wrapped for burial. She should take care to please Christ alone, like a wife with a rigid husband, on whose account she does not dare step out of the ­house.35 34. ​VDM 4.34.c, p. 200; 4.36.h, p. 205; cf. LDM 1.27, pp. 64–66; 4.19.g, p. 178; 5.21.d, p. 245; 5.23.a, p. 247; 5.23.c, p. 247; 5.22.a, pp. 245–46; 5.23.q, p. 249; 5.23.p, p. 249; 5.23.b, p. 247; 5.23.e, p. 247; cf. 5.23.f, pp. 247–48; 5.23.o, pp. 248–49; 5.23.n, p. 248; cf. LDM 3.13, pp. 163–64. 35. ​VDM 3.17.d, p. 135; 4.8.p, pp. 163–64; 5.7.c-­d, p. 221; 5.15.I, p. 235–36; 5.16.a–­d, pp. 236–37; 5.17.a, p. 238; 5.17.l, p. 239; 5.20.b-­l, pp. 243–44; 5.21.a, p. 244; 5.24.d–­h, pp. 250–51; 5.29, pp. 258–60; 5.33.b, p. 264. Cf. LDM 3.3, pp. 150–51; 3.10, pp. 159–60; 5.6.a–­k, pp. 218–20.

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She was preoccupied with cleanliness of body, soul, and surroundings.36 On one occasion she began cleaning her cell with a broom, but Christ told her, “You have been in the habit of cleaning your ­house, but now you should be in the habit of cleaning your soul.” Still, noticing a spot that was not clean, she leapt up, cleaned it, sat back down, looked again and saw that it was still not clean enough, and thought of getting another broom to clean it, ­until Christ moved her head and caused her to look in a dif­fer­ent direction.37 Christ commanded Dorothea what she should report to Marienwerder. She did not simply say to Marienwerder, “How ­g reat is the kindness of our beloved Lord, and how wondrous his grace!”—­rather, Christ told her to say ­these precise words. He told her also to tell him what she could not communicate: “Say to your confessor: if through the entirety of my lifetime I ­were to remain with you, I could not express [certain experiences] fully.”38 When she fell short, Christ let her know. He taught her to recognize her sins, and she could see the most minute of them by looking into herself as if into crystal. She should tell her confessor he had never seen a person so wretched as she and so unworthy of eternal life.39 Any good in her was Christ’s d­ oing; she herself was a wretched creature, scarcely comparable even to a worm, more of a nuisance to the vermin about her than they ­were to her. Her visitors knew how to behave with good manners, while she was uncouth and devoid of virtue.40 When she received some fish cooked in saffron, she gazed at them and even risked tasting them, but the plea­sure was a guilty one for which she feared Christ’s punishment.41 Christ once gave her a list of nine ways she had failed through negligence in using well the graces given her. When she spoke with another w ­ oman, Christ scolded for not attending to him alone.42 Christ could also upbraid her for making what might seem minor slips in communication or for passing along legend as fact. He scolded her for saying to someone that Mary Magdalene was a public prostitute, as she had heard from some preacher.43 In conversation with her confessor she said something incautious for which Christ chastised her strictly. She had tried to say that sometimes all she needed to eat in a day was a single egg, but it had 36. ​VDM 4.8.k, p. 163; 5.24.b, pp. 249–50; cf. 6.1.b, p. 289; 6.4.e, p. 294. 37. ​VDM 5.24.a, p. 249. 38. ​VDM 4.8.n, p. 163; 4.21.g, p. 182; 4.22.e, p. 184; 4.28.f, p. 193; 5.2.a, p. 213; 5.9.b, p. 225; 5.10.g, p. 228; 5.13.f, p. 232; 4.37.f, pp. 206–7; 4.8.f, p. 162. 39. ​VDM 3.2.g and l, pp. 114–15; cf. 5.28.a–­b, pp. 257–58; 5.30.b, p. 260; 5.48.c, p. 286. 40. ​VDM 5.6.k, p. 220; 5.45.b, pp. 284–85; cf. 2.17.b, p. 79; cf. echoes of Psalm 17:43, 34:5 Vulg. 41. ​VDM 3.19.b–3.20.d, pp. 137–39, with lengthy further development; cf. LDM 2.22, pp. 112–16; for another incident see 5.47.b, p. 285. 42. ​LdF c. 63, p. 104; LdF c. 116, p. 197. 43. ​LdF c. 110, p. 187.



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come out wrong. She would gladly have confessed this sin of hers, but t­ here was no confessor pre­sent, so she confessed to Christ himself and received a sign of his forgiveness.44 This all gives the impression that Dorothea suffered from chronic scrupulosity, which not long a­ fter her death Jean Gerson would write against with some sophistication.45 One mark of scrupulosity, the tendency to see in moral terms what ­others would see as pragmatic concerns, was clearly a habit of hers. But why would Marienwerder see scrupulosity as fitting for a hagiographic text? The penitential emphasis serves a double purpose. Most basically, humility is among the virtues most expected of a saint, and to accuse oneself of sin where t­ here is no sin is famously a mark of sanctity.46 More specifically, a ­humble and self-­accusing w ­ oman would surely not deceive or be deceived by false revelations. The humility theme is, among other ­things, among the assurances of authenticity for Dorothea and her revelations. The lives of Gertrude Rickeldey, Margery Kempe, and even Catherine of Siena might seem comparable to that of Dorothea in their emphasis on concrete detail. Particularly in the ­later parts of her biography, Christ gives Gertrude Rickeldey instruction, teaching her his w ­ ill for her, recalling her sins when she goes to confession, informing her what prayers she should say for specific sins and where she should say them, teaching her how to make amends for the way she has given offense with her attire and hairdo, telling her to move to a par­tic­u­lar ­little ­house in Strasbourg, instructing her how often to receive communion, urging her not to drink wine that she craves but is not good for her health, urging her to give her possessions to a w ­ oman who has less than she, telling her to sit on a bench at meals “like any other poor ­sister.”47 For the 44. ​LdF c. 71, p. 120. What she said was, “As for how much food is necessary, I would have enough with one egg for the entire day” (Quantum debere comedere satis haberem in uno ovo pro tota die). Christ asked, “Why did you not say: sometimes I would have enough with one egg for an entire day?” (aliquotiens per integram diem satis in ovo unico haberem).” The word debere should presumably be deberem, but that seems not to have been Christ’s concern. 45. ​Sven Grosse, Heilsungewissheit und Scrupulositas im späten Mittelalter: Studien zu Johannes Gerson und Gattungen der Frömmigkeitstheologie seiner Zeit (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1994). 46. ​Kieckhefer, Unquiet Souls, 122; prob­ably the source ­behind the topos is a letter from Gregory I to Augustine of Canterbury, in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the En­glish P­ eople, 1.27, ed. Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors (Oxford: Clarendon, 1969), 92–93: “Bonarum quippe mentium est, et ibi aliquo modo culpas suas agnoscere ubi culpa non est, quia saepe sine culpa agitur quod uenit ex culpa.” 47. ​Anneke B. Mulder-­Bakker, The Dedicated Spiritual Life of Upper Rhine Noble ­Women: A Study and Translation of a Fourteenth-­Century Spiritual Biography of Gertrude Rickeldey of Ortenberg and Heilke of Staufenberg (Turnhout: Brepols, 2017), c. 4, p. 124; c. 4, p. 125; c. 22, p. 207; c. 23, p. 211; c. 24, pp. 214– 15; c. 25, p. 218; c. 26, pp. 221–22; c. 26, p. 223; c. 28, p. 231. Gertrude had a cautious attitude ­toward her revelations: even though in princi­ple they ­were true, she resisted trusting them (c. 20, p. 199). On one occasion her confessor did not believe something Christ had told her and said “it was the devil who deceived her and haunted her” (c. 27, p. 224).

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most part this instruction is reported straightforwardly, as revelation overtly communicated to her, although in one case she is said to have “had an insight” and been inspired to do something as commandment from Christ.48 The point on which she resembles Dorothea most closely is precisely the turn ­toward private life, and the presence of Christ with her alone, not in or with a monastic community. Gertrude and Dorothea both show something of a hot­house effect: ­because so much is related, in such detail, the presence of Christ appears as a pervasive and absorbing phenomenon. We are not only told but shown what it is like having Christ as a long-­term guest in one’s home. Yet the point is made more eco­nom­ically in Gertrude’s case, with far less detail, and the tone is less insistent, less obsessive, less accusatory. Christ gave Margery Kempe instruction on a wide variety of m ­ atters. He instructed her about her fasting or directed her to resume eating meat. He instructed her to visit a par­tic­ul­ar vicar or to communicate with a certain w ­ idow. At times he gave o ­ thers instruction through her. He counseled her how to pray. He spoke to her about the relative merit of devout exercises and contemplation. He gave her instruction on wearing white clothes or directed her to obtain her confessor’s authorization for wearing them. He gave instruction about her travel. But he did not regulate her life in the same minute detail as with Dorothea, and when he did give counsel, it was more supportive than critical.49 Comparison with Catherine of Siena is differently instructive. She and Dorothea w ­ ere born in the same year, 1347, less than two months apart, although Dorothea lived fourteen years longer than Catherine, for a life approximately half again as long as hers. Both had reform-­minded clerical patrons who recorded their biographies and revelations, focusing largely on their experience of Christ as pre­sent and communicating with them. Both experienced mystical marriage to Christ, and both bore spiritualized versions of the stigmata that assimilated them to Christ.50 In his account of Catherine’s life, Raymond of Capua says Christ “became her frequent visitor,” to the point that “it would be 48. ​Mulder-­Bakker, The Dedicated Spiritual Life, c. 26, p. 223. 49. ​E.g., BMK 1.5–6, pp. 51–52; 1.9, p. 56; 1.11, pp. 59–60; 1.17, pp. 73–74; 1.18, p. 80; 1.19, p. 82; 1.23, pp. 88–89; 1.30, p. 110 and 112; 1.36–37, p. 126–28; 1.43, p. 141; 1.66, pp. 200–201; 1.84, p. 243; 1.85, pp. 248–49; 2.2, p. 269–71. 50. ​André Vauchez, Catherine de Sienne: Vie et passions (Paris: Cerf, 2015); Suzanne Noff ke, “Catherine of Siena,” in Medieval Holy W ­ omen in the Christian Tradition, c. 1100–­c. 1500, ed. Alastair Minnis and Rosalynn Voaden (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010), 601–22; F. Thomas Luongo, The Saintly Politics of Catherine of Siena (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006); Jeffrey F. Hamburger and Gabriela Signori, eds., Catherine of Siena: The Creation of a Cult (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013); Nancy Bradley Warren, The Embodied Word: Female Spiritualities, Contested Orthodoxies, and En­glish Religious Cultures, 1350–1700 (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010), especially 16–23, 28–30, and 36–43.



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hard to find two ­people who spent their time so constantly in each other’s com­pany as t­hese two did.” He was pre­sent to her when she prayed, meditated, or read, even when she slept. If she was speaking with someone e­ lse, Christ would stand t­ here and communicate with her inwardly u ­ ntil she went into rapture and lost contact with her mortal interlocutor. They “held long conversations . . . ​like one intimate friend with another.” They would recite the Psalms together while walking back and forth, like two religious or two clerics jointly reading the office.51 Perhaps most often Catherine’s encounters with Christ took the form of instruction and direction: he offered to teach her how to distinguish his visions from the Dev­il’s; he came to her when she was in prayer and instructed her that he was “He Who Is” while she was “she who is not”; he told her that when she thought of him, he would immediately think of her; he urged her to receive frequent communion; he asked if she desired his w ­ ill or her own.52 Occasionally she received locutions in response to prayer, although once when “the voice of God which had been speaking within her” made no response, that in itself meant her request was heard and granted.53 She prayed for the conversion of a sinner and had the success of her prayer confirmed by a revelation from Christ.54 Christ gave her communion.55 ­These passages might lead us to expect that Catherine, like Dorothea, would find Christ regulating the details of her life and lecturing her on m ­ atters ­g reat and small. That is not, however, what Raymond recorded. Whereas Marienwerder had an almost obsessive urge to jot down every­thing Dorothea told him in their long sessions and to pass as much as pos­si­ble along to his hy­po­ thet­i­cal reader, Raymond took firmer charge of the transmission and gave it clearer shape. The result is a vita that, while still quite long, shows far less detail and redundancy and more regularly subordinates the narrative to an explicit purpose. Marienwerder wrote the ultimate in dense and nuanced female hagiography; Raymond preferred greater economy of narrative but fuller exploration of links both to the larger world of Christendom and to the traditions of Christian hagiography. 51. ​VCS 1.9.86 (Kearns, 78–79); 1.11.112 (Kearns, 103–4). 52. ​VCS1.9.85 (Kearns, 77–78); 1.10.92 (Kearns, 85); 1.10.97 (Kearns, 89); 2.5.166 (Kearns, 160); 2.6.183 (Kearns, 177). 53. ​VCS 1.9.81 (Kearns, 75); 1.11.103–4 (Kearns, 96–97); 3.2.345–46 (Kearns, 320–21). 54. ​VCS 2.4.149a (Kearns, 144–45); cf. 2.7.224–26 (Kearns, 212–14); 2.7.229–30 (Kearns, 216–18). 55. ​VCS 2.12.321 (Kearns, 297). Not only did Christ let her drink from the wound in his side as a baby suckles from the ­mother’s breast, but he teasingly offered and then withdrew the offer, thus intensifying her desire (2.6.191, p. 183). He proffered a golden crown and a crown of thorns, one of which she could bear now, the other in eternity, and of course she grasped the crown of thorns (2.4.158, pp. 151–52).

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While the trajectory for Dorothea runs from life in the world to life in a cell, Catherine’s proceeds in the opposite direction, from a domestic cell out into the world. Christ might be with her, reciting the Psalms or the hours with her, but then would send her away to be with her ­family at dinner, and she would experience this as a rebuff given as punishment for some offense. He told her no, he had no intention of being apart from her for even a moment, but joining her f­ amily was a prelude to g­ oing out into the world for its salvation. She protested that her sex would be an obstacle to active ser­vice; he assured her that nothing was impossible with God and that for him t­ here was no longer male and female.56 Even the imagery of the Song of Songs could be used in support of this new call to active ser­vice: Christ called to her, “Open to me, my ­sister, my beloved, my dove, my unsullied one,” but he meant by this that she should open up souls by her ministry.57 In short, while Christ is a constant presence in the lives of other exceptional ­women, and gives them frequent counsel, Dorothea is unusual in the extent to which Christ micromanages the details of her daily private life.

The Presence of Christ in Devotional Activity The role of Christ in Dorothea’s everyday life can also be seen in her patterns of devotion. In many ways a typically late medieval Christian, Dorothea was a paragon of what Bernd Moeller refers to as “churchly” piety, well before her reclusion.58 For o ­ thers, the pieties of parish life, confraternities, or pilgrimage might be opportunities for communal networking, and at times Dorothea is shown immersed in such pieties along with friends or with her husband, but the focus is almost always on her personal experience.59 Its relevance for our purposes is twofold: Christ often instructs her in her manner of pious exercise, and in the course of her devotion she frequently encounters him. He is thus both the source and the reward for her piety. H ­ ere above all we can see the dialectic of the ordinary and the exceptional: Dorothea’s piety is not dif­fer­ent in kind from that of many contemporaries, but the incitement to it is dif­fer­ent, as is the embeddedness of mystical encounter within what might have seemed typical late medieval devotion. 56. ​VCS 2.1.120–22 (Kearns, 115–17); cf. 2.6.216 (Kearns, 204–5). 57. ​VCS 2.1.119 (Kearns, 114). 58. ​Bernd Moeller,” Religious Life in Germany on the Eve of the Reformation,” in Pre-­Reformation Germany, ed. Gerald Strauss (London: Macmillan, 1972), 13–42. 59. ​Alastair Matthews,” Turning Away: Spaces of Devotion in Das Leben der heiligen Dorothea and the Vita Latina,” Oxford German Studies 39 (2010): 138–46.



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Dorothea speaks of herself as ­running about to vari­ous churches to gain indulgences, to hear preaching and mass, for confession and communion, even to get away from her h ­ ouse­hold, praying church all day without intermission, wishing she could stay at night. Christ instructed her to go aside to some ­humble and secluded spot. He accompanied and guided her, teaching how she should behave along the way. She would commit her c­ hildren to the Lord’s care and go to church before the doors ­were opened and ­others had arrived so she could to be the first to hold vigil, to pray, and to serve the Lord, or at least not to be late in d­ oing so. Often it happened that she had to wait a long time outside the locked doors, weeping and on her knees. When the doors did open, she went to some corner, as Christ instructed, and gave herself over to genuflections, prostrations, and prayers.60 Her eucharistic piety was again something she shared with more ordinary late medieval Christians but in exceptional ways. She was vividly conscious of the real presence of Christ in the sacrament—of a Christ who was received but who also, along with Marienwerder, regulated her reception. She craved communion, even as a child, and in l­ ater life she was not just hungry but famished for it. In her cell she received the sacrament daily and complained if she did not receive it early, eventually persuading Marienwerder to give it to her during the night. Christ gave her permission to receive him sacramentally as often as her confessor did, and when she heard this, she immediately noted that on the feast of the Nativity he received at each of three masses, and she wondered if she too would have that privilege, but Christ said no, just once that day would suffice for her.61 Marienwerder kept the consecrated host reserved and concealed in a tabernacle in the space outside her cell, which served also as a kind of prie-­dieu on which she could kneel, and Christ said she had thus made him pre­sent to her sacramentally as well as spiritually. As if speaking from inside his tabernacle, he said she had compelled him to become her neighbor, nearer to her than anyone ­else. She did not prepare herself for communion; rather Christ himself prepared her, and he had fervent desire to receive himself in her. It was frequently during or ­after communion that she had her most significant spiritual experiences—­a 60. ​VDM 2.7.c, p. 73; 4.36.f, p. 205. Cf. 2.26.c, p. 89; 2.26.f, p. 89; 2.31.f–­g, p. 93; 2.32.m, p. 94; 5.3.a, pp. 214–15; 5.7.h, p. 222; 4.19.c–­e, p. 177, 4.19.g, p. 178. 61. ​VDM 5.38.a, p. 272; 5.38.d, p. 273; 5.38.c and e, p. 273; 5.6.g, p. 219. See André Vauchez, The Laity in the ­Middle Ages: Religious Beliefs and Devotional Practices, ed. Daniel  E. Bornstein, trans. Margery  J. Schneider (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993), 237–42 (“Eucharistic devotion and mystical u ­ nion in late-­medieval female saints”), especially 238–40 (on Dorothea of Montau); Peter Browe, “Die Kommunion der Heiligen im Mittelalter,” Stimmen der Zeit 117 (1929): 425–37, reprinted in Peter Browe, Die Eucharistie im Mittelalter: Liturgiehistorische Forschungen in kulturwissenschaftlicher Absicht, ed. Hubertus Lutterbach and Thomas Flammer (Hamburg: Lit, 2003), 199–209 (with reference to Dorothea on 200 and 202).

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f­ actor that, as Stephen Mossman suggests, links her with holy ­women Marienwerder knew or knew about from his years in Prague.62 Much of Book 3 in the Latin Life is devoted to Dorothea’s participation in that quin­tes­sen­tial late medieval act of devotion, pilgrimage, sometimes with her husband or ­others. On one pilgrimage to a church at Köslin, where she was allowed to spend the night in the church, she was visited by Christ, but fi­nally her companions persuaded her to leave with them. On another pilgrimage to the same church t­here was a g­ reat multitude of pilgrims, she had to spend the night in a stable. Awaiting a visit from Christ to no avail, and she told herself it would have been better to remain at home, but eventually, even as her companions slept and the p­ eople inside the church made tumultuous noise, she was absorbed in spiritual delights.63 At one point when she was on pilgrimage with her husband, they came to a hospice; she was getting out of their cart but was caught up in a divine visitation, so her husband called her. She pondered and de­cided it was better to listen to Christ’s speaking than to get out at her husband’s command. This left her husband furious at her disobedience. She consulted Christ, who said that for the time being she should withdraw from colloquy with him and obey her husband’s command. And so she got out, saddened by the withdrawal.64 At the urging of her confessor she went to Rome for the Jubilee year and was on this pilgrimage half a year, during which time her husband died. She sensed Christ pre­sent as a gracious companion along the entire route. When she was in Rome she visited the seven principal churches daily, then she grew ill and for over seven weeks she could not even stand up and walk but lay in a hospital. ­Those ministering to her despaired of her life, but Christ “the g­ reat physician gave her strength at least to stand on her feet.” When the Sunday came on which the “Veronica” was displayed, she called two strong men to take her to Saint Peter’s, but they could not manage, and left her kneeling in the road.65 Eventually she got to the basilica, lifting herself and walking by clinging to rocks and branches, using a staff, and relying on other ­people’s help. She desperately wanted to complete the requirements for the Jubilee indulgence. But then she discovered she had forgotten how to say the Lord’s Prayer and the Apostles’ Creed, although she had learned them as a child and had 62. ​VDM 5.38.f, p. 273; 5.39.c, p. 274; 5.39.a–­b, p. 274; 5.39.c, p. 274; 5.6.k, p. 220; 5.7.i, p. 222; 5.9.i, 5.13.a, p. 231; 5.14.a, p. 232; 5.29.e, p. 259; 5.37.c, pp. 271–72; Mossman, “Dorothea von Montau and the Masters of Prague,” 117–18. 63. ​VDM 3.14.a–­b, p. 131; 3.14.d–­e, pp. 131–32. 64. ​VDM 3.14.f-­g, p. 132. 65. ​Ewa Kuryluk, Veronica and Her Cloth: History, Symbolism, and Structure of a “True” Image (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991).



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said them many times during her illness; eventually she relearned them. Christ ­later revealed that he had wanted her to experience such affliction in Rome ­because t­ here she was without help from ­those known to her, which was all the more cause for her to manifest the virtue of patience.66

The Presence of Christ in Social Relations She participated, then, in the ordinary devotions of pious late medieval Christians, but with exceptional intensity and with guidance but also affliction from an ever-­present Christ. The role of Christ in quotidian detail can be seen also in accounts of Dorothea’s relations with ­those around her. As already mentioned, Marienwerder’s repre­sen­ta­tion of Dorothea centers on the triangulated relationship of Dorothea, Christ (often with his m ­ other), and the hagiographer himself, deemphasizing any social connections Dorothea may have had. The local devotees and benefactors—­and for that ­matter the saints who come in Christ’s retinue—­are mainly ­silent bystanders witnessing the tightly exclusive relationship with Christ and Marienwerder. Even on Marienwerder’s telling, however, she did have a social network. One incident is particularly instructive about her relations with other p­ eople in her community and her constant appeal to Christ in the management of ­these relations. He had instructed her to take hot food, and some fish had been sent to her, cooked in such a way that it was dried out and had become so stuck to the jar that she had to pry it out, then found it hard and indigestible. It occurred to her—or rather, Christ called it to her mind—­that the ­woman who brought her this fish would not think of putting it in her own mouth, but ate finer foods. “If she loved me properly,” he continued, “she would take ­those fine foods out of her mouth and offer them to you.” She should show one bit of the fish to her confessor, yet urge him not to correct the ­woman on that account. She did as Christ instructed, then regretted having shared her grievance, but Christ told her she had done the right t­ hing.67 Most obviously, the incident shows Dorothea as needing and receiving support from benefactors but being par­tic­u­lar about the nature of the support and aggrieved if it was not to her liking. We learn nothing about the benefactor, but while she remains a distant figure, Christ emerges as a close and familiar one. Dorothea reports her grievance to Marienwerder, feels uneasy with her own peevishness, but then receives divine validation for giving vent to her complaint. She 66. ​VDM 3.23–26, pp. 143–47; cf. 7.4.a–­b, p. 293; cf. LDM 2.25, pp. 120–23. 67. ​VDM 5.20.a, pp. 242–43.

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experiences anger, the emotion makes her uncomfortable, but then she reconciles herself to it with the assurance that it was not only justified in princi­ple but required by precept. ­Family life when she lived in Gdansk was a distraction from her relationship with Christ. She often had to break off com­pany with Christ to tend in obedience to her husband.68 She was occupied with Christ and oblivious to outward ­things and thus often beaten by her husband. She cared for him when he fell ill, but then he blamed her for dispensing lavish alms.69 Only one of her ­children survived her; they too w ­ ere mainly distractions from piety. Wishing to impress a kind of sign on her heart during her first childbirth, Christ placed a large wound on her chest that lasted approximately twenty years, and it pained her all the more when she was nursing. This was done, it seemed, so that her beloved bridegroom might rest between her breasts like a bundle of myrrh (Song of Songs 1:12), and so that her love for her ­children, which was sometimes excessive, might be moderated.70 When she was bereft of ­family, Christ told her how grateful she should be for protecting her at times from her husband’s abuse when he was alive.71 She seems to have been only distantly connected with her own ­mother, who had inspired her childhood pieties. When she had been established in her cell, report of that circumstance came to her ­mother, who in her simplicity (or perhaps sarcasm) asked what ­great crime she had committed to be thus locked up. Christ told her she should pass word along that he had given her a better name than she had previously had, for previously she had been the spouse of a corruptible man of the world, but now she was bride of an eternal bridegroom.72 In her last years, ­after she moved to the town of Marienwerder, she had not only social contacts but an incipient following, according to her hagiographer. When she was in church on one occasion, several men and ­women who had been inspired by manifestations of her sanctity and by pious compassion came up, wept, and commended themselves to her prayer. When she entered the cell, she was accompanied by her two spiritual sons and by a g­ reat throng of ­people. A multitude gathered around her cell as if about a queen making a rare appearance from her remote ­castle.73 She had a coterie of benefactors, and she was assured that t­hose who supported her in the cell would have a 68. ​VDM 3.14.g, p. 132. 69. ​VDM 3.13.c–­h, pp. 130–31. 70. ​VDM 2.32.c, p. 95. 71. ​VDM 3.13.i, p. 131. 72. ​VDM 5.8.i–­l, pp. 224–25. 73. ​VDM 5.7.i, p. 222; 5.7.k, p. 222; 5.24.c, p. 250.



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g­ reat reward, greater than if they had gone to Rome as pilgrims.74 Christ told her he wanted her piety to be widely known and become a source of ­favor for ­those who honored her. She should pray day and night for her benefactors, and she should be concerned about other p­ eople’s sins. He listed the categories of ­people she should pray for, and he told her to intercede for specific souls in purgatory.75 She had a vision of a multitude, living and dead, indigent and wretched, and she was terror-­struck at not knowing how to satisfy their desires, but Christ told her to pray to him on their behalf.76 Yet having visitors could also be a distraction, ­because Christ and his ­mother demanded her uncompromised attention. When she sensed the divine presence, she withdrew as much as pos­si­ble from conversation with other p­ eople. She knew he was a bashful spouse, not accustomed to indulging his bride with his presence when t­ here ­were ­others about.77 She could be punished for spending too much time in conversation with visitors. In the last year of her life, Mary appeared to her repeatedly during the Christmas season and showed her how she treated her infant son, but then at the end of January both Mary and Jesus suddenly became less friendly t­oward her and treated her the way respectable hosts treat an indiscreet lodger who on entering the ­house has not closed the door ­behind himself or who has let someone displeasing into the ­house. Mary and her son then upbraided her sternly on account of a conversation she had the previous eve­ning, without their permission, with a man who had come to her wanting instruction about spiritual ­matters. She admitted her guilt and gave no excuse, but wept, fearing they might leave her or evict her from her cell. Mary took her son (wrapped in swaddling clothes) in her arms and told her she should not fear—­they would not leave her, but if they did, it would be a cause of ­great shame to have treated her hosts so badly. Jesus then suggested words that Dorothea might say to Mary, asking her to remain, and Dorothea repeated this plea. She then besought Mary through the infant, asking that she might be allowed to hold the child. By way of stern instruction, Mary told her they would sit together with her so she could learn by example how to treat her son. In par­tic­u­lar she should learn from Mary’s example not to be so talkative.78 In some ways she was like the stylite saints of late antiquity, an intercessor, standing in a kind of patron-­client relationship with ­those about her, attracting 74. ​VDM 5.12.k, p. 231. 75. ​VDM 4.3.e, p. 155; 4.4.a, pp. 155–56; 5.12.h, p. 230; 5.9.a, p. 225; 5.9.i, p. 226; 5.24.h, p. 251; 5.12.b, pp. 229–30; 5.24.e, p. 250; cf. LDM 3.14, p. 165. 76. ​VDM 5.12.c, p. 230. 77. ​VDM 4.36.g, p. 205; 5.7.k, p. 222. 78. ​VDM 5.15.a–­d, pp. 234–35; cf. LDM 3.9, pp. 158–59.

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attention while remaining aloof.79 With Dorothea, as also with the stylites, this way of relating to ­others was in part the product of her situation, in her case reclusion late in life. It was also a manner of keeping distance that could be seen ­earlier but came to its culmination in her final enclosure, making her seem to herself and to ­others a ­woman set apart.

The Presence of Christ as Bridegroom in Mystical Experience If on the one hand Dorothea represents an extreme case of the everyday saint—­one whose saintliness is worked out in all the detail of everyday life—­ Marienwerder also represented her as a paradigm of mystical experience, both positive and tormenting, and this too he rec­ords in excruciating detail.80 We know that Marienwerder was steeped in the lit­er­a­ture of mysticism. To persuade his reader that Dorothea’s inspiration was genuine and divine, he quoted from the work of Jerome, John Chrysostom, Peter Chrysologus, and (more predictably) Richard of Saint-­Victor.81 His own distillation of that lit­er­a­ture seems to have given him a framework for interpretation of her spiritual experience, although in other re­spects the governing framework for the Latin Life is derived from the Book of Revelation.82 No doubt he shared at least some of the interpretation with Dorothea, and presumably she would have embraced his perspective and recognized herself in his account. Each of them surely learned to speak with the other’s voice, but on balance it seems unlikely that Dorothea herself was the main source for the interpretive framework that Marienwerder lends to her mystical experience. Seven forms of experience w ­ ere recurrent and fundamental to Dorothea’s mystical life as Marienwerder reported it: rapture, immision of the Holy Spirit, banqueting within her soul, spiritual pregnancy, wounding, and what he recorded as a form of mystical “energy.” All seven lead into the bridal or theoerotic mysticism most fully laid out in the last books of the Latin Life. The first of ­these phenomena, rapture, involved abstraction from the external world, with 79. ​Peter R. L. Brown, “The Saint as Exemplar,” Repre­sen­ta­tions 1 (1983): 1–25; also in J. S. Hawley, ed., Saints and Virtues (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987), 3–14. 80. ​Sieglinde Hartmann, “Bridal Mysticism and the Politics of the Anchorhold: Dorothy of Montau,” in Anchoritism in the ­Middle Ages: Texts and Traditions, ed. Catherine Innes-­Parker and Naoë Kukita Yoshikawa (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2013), 101–13; Dyan Elliott, The Bride of Christ Goes to Hell: Meta­phor and Embodiment in the Lives of Pious W ­ omen, 200–1500 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 220–25. 81. ​VDM 1.9.e, pp. 57–58. 82. ​Hörner, Dorothea von Montau, especially 141–57, on the prologue.



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alienation from her body, sometimes for hours, even a day or two. She might seem drunk, or asleep, or mad. If she entered rapture while eating, she might return not knowing what she had eaten, or where, or with whom. A rhythm of rapture and return (raptus et reditus) was virtually habitual for her.83 The second phenomenon, immision of the Spirit, Marienwerder recounted in less graphic, more abstract terms. Routinely it was Christ who sent the Spirit and told Dorothea that he had done so. The sending was a repeated phenomenon that could occur several times in the course of a day.84 The third theme, the dif­fer­ ent forms of love that Dorothea experienced, recalls Richard of Saint-­Victor’s schema of wounding, binding, languishing, and fainting love. In his Septililium, Marienwerder cata­logued Dorothea’s forms of love as priceless, deeply rooted, boiling, wondrously desiring, covetous, enriching, gushing, super-­effluent, and so forth. In the same work he spoke of thirty-­six degrees of love and their combinations; in the German life it was thirty-­seven degrees.85 One might expect the fourth theme, Christ celebrating a banquet in her soul, to involve a banquet Christ shares with Dorothea, but it is, rather, one he celebrates within her along with the ­Father and the Holy Spirit.86 The fifth ele­ment in Marienwerder’s account, Dorothea’s mystical pregnancy, is sometimes expressed in vividly somatic terms, closely mimicking the physical childbearing that was familiar to Dorothea: Christ pressed down on her so much, it felt as though her skin would burst, her womb swelled, and she sensed a fully formed fetus within her.87 Mystical pregnancy is sometimes preceded by a romantic encounter that makes Christ both her lover and the fruit of that love: she felt Christ’s kisses and embraces, and forthwith her womb was as g­ reat as when she was about to give birth bodily.88 Book 4 of the Latin Life focuses on a sixth theme, the wounds caused by the darts and arrows of love. Her faculties and senses w ­ ere all wounded. She was wounded in both soul and body, just as if she had come from b­ attle, but her spiritual wounds ­were all the more afflicting ­because they ­were deeply intimate. The text goes so far as to claim that Dorothea not only resembled but was in fact 83. ​VDM 1.8.c, p. 53; 2.40.c, p. 106; 3.6.d, p. 119; 3.9.f, p. 123; 3.9.p, p. 125; 4.5.c–­d, p. 157; 4.21.d, p. 182; 4.27.i, p. 192; 4.28.h, p. 194; 4.34.f, 4.38.a, p. 207; 5.7.m, p. 223; 5.21.d, p. 245. 84. ​VDM 5.13.e, p. 232. 85. ​Joannes Marienwerder, “Septililium beatae Dorotheae montoviensis,” ed. Franz Hipler, Analecta Bollandiana 2 (1883): 381–472, 3 (1884): 113–40 and 408–48, 4 (1885): 207–51. On this work see Hörner, Dorothea von Montau, 182–97 (especially 188–91, on the first tractate). 86. ​VDM 4.30–33, pp. 195–200; also 3.6.b, p. 119; 4.31.a, p. 196; 4.32.e, p. 197–98; 4.33.k, p. 199; 5.7.e, p. 221; 5.17.g, p. 239. He does allow her to be inebriated with the cup of his divinity: 6.9.e, p. 301. The term used for “banquet” does not occur in the Vulgate version of the Song of Songs, although it does occur in Genesis eight times, Esther sixteen times, and the gospel of Luke four times. Still, feasting with drinking is part of the bridal cele­bration in the Song of Songs. 87. ​VDM 4.17.d, p. 174; 4.33.b, 4.37; 5.7.e, p. 221; 5.7.l, p. 222. 88. ​VDM 4.37.a, pp. 205–6; cf. 4.37.b, p. 206.

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a martyr: ­those who suffer arduous martyrdoms over an extended time would be rewarded in proportion to the extent of their suffering, so the spiritual martyrs who go through many martyrdoms of body and ­will can expect greater reward than whose who experience only one brief martyrdom.89 On Marienwerder’s telling, it is not easy to distinguish between positive, energizing aspects of Dorothea’s mystical life and ­those that caused her anguish. Throughout her life she expected, experienced, and even welcomed physical illness, which she aggravated with voluntary mortifications, but the Latin Life deals more expansively with her spiritual affliction, mainly in the form of a mystical “energy,” a seventh theme. The term might seem indebted to the Orthodox mysticism of Hesychasm, which views energy as a divine operation effective and sensible in h ­ uman experience, but in the case of Dorothea the energy is more afflictive than it characteristically is in Hesychast sources.90 Five chapters in Book 4 of the Latin Life are devoted to this phenomenon.91 Spiritual “energy” occurred inwardly but manifested itself also outwardly in her body. Marienwerder speaks of a fervent boiling-­over (bullicio) of energy from her innermost self, expressed in an impetuous pulsing of her veins, a fervent warmth of her ­whole body, and sweat that flowed abundantly from all her members. Some notion of its working could be seen in the bloody sweat that Jesus experienced during the agony in the garden. Dorothea was afflicted e­ very day with it and made so infirm that she sometimes seemed near death. It caused a loud ringing in her head and l­ abor throughout her body. She would gladly have done prostrations and other exercises rather than suffer this energy, but it is energy, Marienwerder says, that draws a person powerfully to Christ.92 Christ himself told her this energy was good and useful as a form of mortification. This “inward ­labor” was more useful to her and more pleasing to him than outward ­labors. Energy is rare, and correspondingly fruitful; t­hose who are charged with carry­ing out external l­abors can rarely attain to the experience of energy.93 Marienwerder clearly takes mystical energy as a manifestation of grace, however disturbing it may be, and we are to see it as a force that comes upon Dorothea from outside. Still, it is hard not to suppose that he is saying something about her personality: that she was marked by a kind of ner­vous energy 89. ​VDM 4.13–16; also 5.2.d; 5.2.h, p.  214; 5.35; 5.35.b, p.  269; 4.13.a–­b, p.  170; 4.14.a, p.  171; 4.15.a, p. 172; 4.15.b, p. 172; 4.23, pp. 185–87; also 5.2.b, p. 213; 4.23.c, p. 185; cf. 4.23.b, p. 185; 4.23.d, p. 186; cf. LDM 2.38, pp. 141–42; 4.23.f, p. 186. 90. ​John Anthony McGuckin, Standing in God’s Holy Fire: The Byzantine Tradition (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2001); John Meyendorff, A Study of Gregory Palamas, 2nd ed. (London: Faith Press, 1974). 91. ​VDM 4.6–10; also 4.21.d, 5.17.a. 92. ​VDM 4.6–7, pp. 158–61. 93. ​VDM 4.9.b, p. 164–65; 4.10.a–­c, p. 166.



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that got channeled into mystical experience, that it was manifested in her extreme sensitivity, her strength of w ­ ill, the difficulties she experienced as an unconventional parishioner in Gdansk, and the sheer intensity of her be­hav­ior and language. No doubt she and he both recognized her as a spiritually intense person, and they might not have denied that she was also given to ner­vous intensity, even if they recognized its cause and its purpose as super­natural. Her spiritual experience often brought with it vari­ous inabilities. ­Whether swept away in ecstatic joy or suffering her “energy,” she could not stand or walk, she could not rise from bed, sometimes she could not even sit. Sometimes she could not confess her sins, hear or understand preaching, or receive communion. Most frequent, and perhaps most surprising, was an inability to pray. At times even her communication from Christ sounds almost like an impediment rather than a blessing: when Christ was speaking she could not hear a preacher or remember what he said, and—­most remarkably—­Christ’s speaking and whispering got in the way of her prayer.94 ­These inabilities are a recurrent theme in The Book of Feasts. Even when her mystical experiences brought delight, they could lead to sheer exhaustion. Once at mass she was filled with such “exuberance of spiritual delights” that she had to make her way with difficulty out of the chapel and withdraw to a place where she could rest. ­There she lay in bed with Christ, remaining u ­ ntil eve­ning, unable to move or to speak or to take any food. Her companions thought she was suffering a bodily illness and offered some sort of medicine.95 Whereas ­these seven aspects of Dorothea’s mystical life are recurrent, another occurred on one specific occasion and became a reference point for l­ater experiences. Marienwerder refers to it as the “extraction” of her heart. On January 25, 1385, at age thirty-­nine, when she had been tempted by a “spirit of diffidence,” Dorothea sought to overcome the temptation by g­ oing to the high altar of the Virgin at Gdansk, where she offered fifty Ave Marias on bended knee. (This occurrence is thus a point of intersection between her mystical experience and her immersion in everyday piety.) ­Because many ­people ­were standing about, she was not able to remain kneeling t­ here for long but was forced to rise up. In the midst of the gathering, Christ extracted her old heart and replaced it with a new one, fervently inflamed. Withdrawn from her outer senses and raised up above herself, she sensed her heart being extracted from her and in its place a fleshy mass being placed, wholly set on fire. It was a renewal not only of 94. ​LdF c. 59, p. 97; c. 60, p. 99; c. 63, p. 105; c. 74, p. 126; LdF c. 20, pp. 39–40; c. 32, pp. 60–61; c. 51, p. 84; c. 63, p. 105; c. 65, pp. 107–8; c. 71, p. 119; LdF c. 20, pp. 39–40; c. 33, p. 62; c. 60, p. 98; c. 70, p. 118; c. 74, p. 126; c. 83, pp. 140–41; c. 114, p. 192; c. 121, pp. 202–3; c. 123, p. 208; c. 86, p. 145; LdF c. 33, p. 62; c. 87, pp. 146–47. 95. ​VDM 3.6.f, p. 118; 3.6.g, pp. 118–19; 3.6.h–­f, p. 119.

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her spiritual heart but of her bodily heart as well.96 The experience comes embedded in a narrative of moral doubt—­Dorothea is seeking to overcome temptation—­and of social context that is glimpsed in passing—­she is a solitary individual within a throng, as she so often was. Marienwerder speaks of an extraction rather than an exchange of hearts, perhaps ­because the new heart is not expressly said to be Christ’s own, as it often is in thirteenth-­and fourteenth-­ century hagiography.97 It is still Christ who does the transformation, but the strong emphasis on literal physicality may have made it harder for Marienwerder to accept that the heart he gave her was Christ’s own. ­Whether Marienwerder was recounting mystical afflictions or mystical ­favors, his imagery borrowed regularly from the Song of Songs. The allusion is most obvious and most frequent in his use of Sponsus and Sponsa, Bridegroom and Bride, for Christ and Dorothea. ­Those terms occur pervasively in Marienwerder’s work, and the aspects of her mystical experience that occur repeatedly are often linked at least implicitly with the Song of Songs: Dorothea’s spiritual wounding recalls that of the bride (Song of Songs 4:9). When Christ bestowed ineffable joy on her soul, he caused her to exclaim, “O sweet south wind, blow through my soul with roses, lilies, and many kinds of flowers!” (Song of Songs 4:16). She had wished to be brought into the sweet wine cellar of the Song of Songs and inebriated ­there, but he said, “Behold, you have me ­here, and whoever has me, has the sweetest wine, so rise up, drink from me, and be inebriated” (Song of Songs 1:3, 5:1).98 In its penultimate book the Latin Life turns to one of the most impor­tant developments in Dorothea’s hagiography, her mystical betrothal and marriage. The theme of spiritual marriage was a familiar one, implicit in any reference to a saintly figure as a “bride of Christ,” often grounded in imagery adapted from the Song of Songs, and associated in par­tic­ul­ar with the legend of Saint Catherine of Alexandria.99 In the Latin Life of Dorothea, the turn to this theme continues mystical motifs developed ­earlier in the vita, both the bridal 96. ​VDM 3.1.a–­g, pp. 112–13; LDM 2.1, pp. 77–79; cf. Ezek. 36:25; Undine Brückner and Regula Forster, “Die Herzenserneuerung bei Dorothea von Montau, Katharina von Siena und Muhammad,” Oxford German Studies 39 (2010): 198–212. 97. ​Barbara Newman, “Iam cor meum non sit suum: Exchanging Hearts, from Heloise to Helfta” in From Knowledge to Beatitude: St. Victor, Twelfth-­Century Scholars, and Beyond, ed. E. Ann ­Matter and Lesley Smith (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013), 281–99; Barbara Newman, The Permeable Self: Five Medieval Relationships (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021), chap. 3. Pauline Lovelock and Kate Adams, “From Darkness to Light: C ­ hildren Speak of Divine Encounter,” International Journal of ­Children’s Spirituality 22, (2017): 42–43, tell of a young girl in modern ­England who reported feeling that God gave her “a new heart.” 98. ​VDM 4.31.b, p. 196; 4.33.i, p. 199; 4.35.i; 3.6.a, p. 118. 99. ​Hildegard Richter, Ave Katharina: Auf den Spuren der Heiligen Katharina von Alexandrien (Kiel: Ludwig, 2014), 233–43.



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mysticism and the mystical affliction, but in other ways this book marks a significant shift. A single complex of events now occupies almost the entirety of Book 7. The visionary ele­ment has up to now been subordinated to the auditory, but now the balance is reversed. Whereas the scene has previously been Dorothea’s own environment, this book opens onto a visionary landscape that extends from Dorothea’s cell all the way to heaven. And once the marriage has been celebrated, mystical afflictions return but in more intense form, and they disclose a relationship in which Dorothea is subjected to tests of her marital love. The marriage is hard not to perceive as abusive, filled as it is with what seems deliberate cruelty. The betrothal occurs when she receives communion and perceives Christ coming to her, filling her with delight and shooting many sweet arrows of love into her heart, causing it to leap for joy. Wishing to take her as his bride, Christ purges her, illumines her, and perfects her in beauty, bestowing on her in rapid succession the three stages in the classic mystical way. She is variously adorned, given garments of white and then of vari­ous other colors, as well as necklaces and a crown.100 When they have been betrothed, Christ says he wished to be joined to her now more fully and lovingly than he has ever before, and indeed her soul is fused with her bridegroom.101 In ecstasy she sees herself in a wondrous heavenly palace, led into a supremely beautiful chamber where her bridegroom shows himself with joyful face. A ­great com­pany of saints enter into the chamber, and they greet her with reverence. Being thus led into the bridegroom’s wine cellar, she is inebriated (Song of Songs 2:4).102 She prepares herself then for the marriage of the Lamb (Revelation 19:7, 9). On September 16, 1393, again when she receives communion, Christ comes to her as if accompanied by a ­great army, bearing riches and manifesting ­great glory. She runs swiftly to him, through the throng, desiring nothing other than him. Christ impresses himself on her soul, deeply merging himself into it, and she clings to him. The more intimate their ­union, the more she weeps from love and delight. The bridegroom tells her he has come now to unite himself with her fully.103 Their marriage is followed by long whispered conversation in the marriage chamber, and her introduction into that chamber is likened to that of Saint Catherine.104 Christ prepares for her a hall in which she can receive him, surrounded by a wall so no one but he can enter, a kind of spiritual analogue to 100. ​VDM 6.11.b, p. 303; 6.12.a, p. 305; 6.12.e–­f, p. 306. 101. ​VDM 6.15.a, p. 310. 102. ​VDM 6.16.c–­d, p. 311. 103. ​VDM 6.17.a–­c, pp. 312–13. 104. ​VDM 6.18, pp. 314–15.

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the literal cell she inhabited.105 At the time when the priest is about to celebrate mass and is putting on his priestly vestments, Dorothea sees her bridegroom preparing himself with the royal magnificence for coming to her in the sacrament—an example of the double vision in which Christ is reflected in the priest acting in persona Christi. During mass she sees the bridegroom close at hand, coming with g­ rand might and glory and honor. She cannot see the host when it is elevated, and at the time of communion she is barely able to go to the win­dow of her cell to receive communion. But her bridegroom rushes ­toward her, accompanied by a multitude of saints, rich and power­f ul and glorious, bearing trea­sures, and he falls upon her with kisses and embraces, uniting her to himself. During mass the bride turn to the bridegroom and cry out to him u ­ ntil he comes to her in the sacrament.106 Interspersed with the details of the marriage are comments again on Dorothea’s mystical pregnancy. Her heart is dilated, and her womb becomes large and heavy as if with a living fetus about to be born.107 Christ tells her he had come to her with violent charity, wishing to do g­ reat bodily vio­lence to her and to bear himself in her soul.108 “And how should my bride know that she had conceived me, or that she would bear me, if I did not grow in her or increase myself in her?”109 The mystical afflictions Dorothea have suffered for years now become more intense and more specifically framed as the sorts of trial a husband is expected to impose on his wife. Christ touches her heart, not with arrows or darts of love as he has done for many years, but as if placing his hand on it and spreading it apart, and she does not know ­whether it is Christ or death that is ­doing this, so she turns aside and seeks a fitting place to lie down and die. She sees two new and splendid lances in her heart, one held by Christ and the other by his ­mother, and the shafts are very long, rising from her heart all the way to heaven. (It is hard not to suppose that Marienwerder is celebrating a medical crisis as a mystical f­avor.) ­After some time Christ and his m ­ other withdraw the lances slightly, which c­ auses yet more pain, but then Christ heals the wounds and removes the pain, giving her ­g reat joy.110 Even before the marriage she was Christ’s bride and he her bridegroom, and he had declared himself a strict bridegroom to her: he demanded that she exert herself day and night to please him and him alone, and she should think 105. ​VDM 6.20.b, p. 317. 106. ​VDM 6.20.e, p. 317; 6.21.a–­d, pp. 318–19; 6.22.h, p. 321; cf. LDM 3.27–33, pp. 184–93. 107. ​VDM 6.17.e, p. 313. 108. ​“Volens tibi in corpore magnam facere violenciam.” 109. ​VDM 6.21.f, p. 319: “me in ea maiorarem.” 110. ​VDM 6.24.b, p. 323; 6.24.e–­f, p. 324.



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of him as a rigid husband, on whose account she dare not step out of the ­house; he would provide so many consolations for her in her cell that she would prefer to remain with him rather than ­going out.111 Now it becomes clearer what this language might mean. He says to her with earnest manner, “It often happens that a carnal bridegroom displays himself in this way to his bride, and she has much to tell her friends about this. I too now wish to do vio­lence to you, so that you ­will have much to tell your dearest friends. I have pierced your heart with hard, long lances, so that with your friends you may truly know and confess openly that you have a power­ful and earnest bridegroom.” Her soul cries out loudly, “Lord Jesus Christ, my most loving one, help me.” Then the lances again come out, renewing her pains, and her womb, which during ­these piercings is usually quite large, like a ­woman’s in childbirth, is diminished.112 On one occasion Christ says, “When a bridegroom who loves his bride wishes to withdraw from her, he customarily leaves a memorial, by which the bride may keep him in memory and may cry out with g­ reat yearning for him. A carnal bridegroom also sometimes exercises his bride with l­ abors and imposes pressure on her, so she may become ill and languish. He does not leave her lying in bed, but he looks at her with solicitude and refreshes her. And if I did not exercise you with ­labors, and if I did not bear down with afflictions to your dilated womb, how would you know from this that I am your bridegroom?” Elsewhere this question is given in a more pointed formulation: “If I d­ idn’t trou­ble and oppress you, how would you know that I was your bridegroom?”113 Marienwerder refers the reader at this point to Revelation 3:19, “­Those whom I love, I rebuke and chastise.”114 ­These experiences come shortly before Dorothea’s death. Already it is clear that on Marienwerder’s telling her life built to a g­ rand spiritual finale, in which her passion for her bridegroom grows unbearably intense and takes her well beyond t­hose forms of piety that can be ascribed to anything like ordinary

111. ​VDM 5.6.f, p. 219. 112. ​VDM 6.25.d, pp. 325–26. 113. ​“Non laborarem et aggravarem.” 114. ​VDM 6.25.e–­g, p. 326 (“Et ego si te non exercerem laboribus et premerem magnificati uteri gravaminibus, quid scires de hoc, quod ego existerem sponsus tuus?”); LdF c. 53, p. 87 (“Si te non laborarem et aggravarem, unde scires, quod Sponsus tuus essem?”). Note that in medieval as in classical Latin ex(s)istere could take a predicate nominative, and that construction fits the context of the passage from VDM better than “that I your bridegroom exist.”

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devout intuition. Her amanuensis is the privileged observer to a soul withdrawing from the world and then taking flight from it into visionary realms. Throughout this material, Marienwerder clearly builds on a long tradition of bridal mysticism, and much could be said about what is similar and what is dif­fer­ent from other hagiographic texts. The differences between Dorothea and Catherine of Siena can be seen most obviously in the ways their hagiographers shape their narratives. Raymond of Capua, an arguably more skilled and certainly more successful hagiographer, let his reader know that Catherine experienced an ongoing relationship with Christ, but rather than giving formulaic and redundant detail, he focused to a greater degree on the most impor­tant manifestations of Christ’s presence and of theoerotic relationship: her childhood visions of Christ enthroned in the sky over the Dominican church, her spiritual espousal, her exchange of heart with Christ, her stigmatization, and her drinking from the wound in Christ’s side.115 Catherine’s relationship with Christ is also less tormented than Dorothea’s, but that difference goes hand in hand with the mode of narrative, ­because Marienwerder’s manner of pre­sen­ta­tion tends to highlight the habitually abusive nature of Christ’s presence. The distinction between two themes in Dorothea’s life, Christ’s presence in everyday ­matters and Christ’s presence as the mystical bridegroom, is in one re­spect potentially misleading. It may suggest that in the first mode Christ’s presence is thoroughly interwoven with Dorothea’s life but that in the second it is relatively detached from her quotidian affairs. In the texts themselves, the themes are distinguishable but intermingled, and thus even as bridegroom Christ is an ongoing presence in her life. Furthermore, the accounts of mystical betrothal and marriage are contextualized by the mass and by communion; even Christ’s vesting himself is simultaneous with that of the priest. To be sure, in Books 4 and 5 of the Latin Life the focus is increasingly on mystical themes, but even then the ever closer, ever more intense, and ever more tortured bridal relationship builds ­toward the dénouement of her death. One might thus say that Christ is pre­sent to her at ­every moment in her life and still at ­every moment as she is departing from life. 115. ​VCS 1.2.29 (Kearns, 29) (childhood vision); 1.12.114–16 (Kearns, 106–07) (espousal); 2.6.179– 80 (Kearns, 174–75) (exchange of heart), 2.6.193, 195, (Kearns, 185–86) (stigmatization); 2.4.163 (Kearns, 155–56), and cf. 3.6.414 (Kearns, 376) (drinking from wound). The adult visions involved physical effects, but in ways that ­were concealed and even ambiguous. The engagement ring remained on Catherine’s fin­ger, but only she could see it. When she was being given the stigmata, she asked that they not be vis­i­ble to ­others, and so the blood-­red rays emanating from Christ changed to bright light and produced invisible stigmata.



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Christ is not only the source of revelations for Dorothea but a character in the drama of her life with whom she relates in much the same way she related to ­others in her small circle. He can be controlling and comforting as Marienwerder is, controlling and at least apparently abusive in a way that uncomfortably reminds the reader of her ­human husband. Not all ­those who experienced Christ’s presence outside the cloister had that kind of densely nuanced relationship with Christ as a personality, but it was more to be expected outside than within the cloister. The tighter the circle, the greater the constraint.

The Presence of Christ as Instructor If in the quotidian details we mainly hear Dorothea’s own voice, and in the mystical experiences we hear more of Marienwerder’s overriding voice, it may be harder to make a distinction with regard to a third theme in the vita, that of Dorothea’s revelations as a kind of learning. On this point Dorothea’s interests and Marienwerder’s may be quite dif­fer­ent, yet they converge.116 The very first chapter in the vita tells us that Dorothea’s revelations constituted a kind of learning comparable with that of the schools. A preacher at Gdansk had said in a sermon, “Some p­ eople presumptuously dare to say that they have gained learning from God alone, when they have not undertaken any par­tic­u­lar ­labor in studying” (laborem notabilem . . . ​in studendo). Dorothea marveled at the preacher’s simplicity and said to herself, “How can a preacher like this dare to say that one who gains learning from God does not ­labor, when no one can learn immediately from God without being inflamed by God with fervent love?” Such love, she protested silently, is itself a kind of ­labor. Christ concurred: ­those who learn directly from the Lord are burdened with heavier l­abor than t­ hose who study from books. To learn from him, she must l­abor diligently, in tears and suffering.117 It is conceivable but unlikely that Marienwerder in­ven­ted this incident. Dorothea’s frustration with the preacher serves no clear hagiographic purpose but does seem consonant with the irritability seen elsewhere in her life. Even if the precise wording of the 116. ​Cf. Mary Jeremy Finnegan, The ­Women of Helfta: Scholars and Mystics (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991), 65, on Christ as “best of teachers” to Gertrude of Helfta. Gertrud Jaron Lewis, By ­Women, for ­Women, about ­Women: The Sister-­Books of Fourteenth-­Century Germany (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1996), 277–80, gives examples from the sister-­books of ­sisters who received insights or gained par­tic­u­lar knowledge from Christ, and one who, having been taught by a schoolmaster who was the source of all wisdom, had knowledge exceeding that of t­hose with mere book learning. 117. ​VDM 1.1.b–­c and e, pp. 30–31.

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passage was molded by Marienwerder, building on the ambiguity of the verb studēre (meaning e­ ither “study” or “be zealous”), it was prob­ably Dorothea herself who took umbrage at what she conceived as a slight. Yet her learning was dif­fer­ent from that of the schools, and when the text goes on to specify the distinction, it falls back on learned and even scholastic formulations of a type more likely to come from Marienwerder than from Dorothea. Having never sat in a classroom, Dorothea could minimize the differences between herself and the scholars, but Marienwerder the sometime Prague theologian could not, and so he explains that her learning was spiritual rather than strictly scholastic.118 Christ told her she did not need “­great teaching,” ­because “small teaching” would suffice for her purposes, but still he gave her “wondrous teaching” that she should impart to ­others in written form for their betterment.119 She should not concern herself with high m ­ atters regarding the Trinity; he could have revealed such ­matters to her, but that was not what he wanted her to receive.120 In par­tic­u­lar she knew about Christ himself. She learned to read vari­ous lessons in the book of life which is Christ.121 Christ told her to read carefully, “for I am your study and scripture.”122 Within the specific sphere of what had been revealed to her, she could presume to teach t­hose with academic credentials, and this was a point on which she and her spiritually minded confessor seem to have agreed. The teachings she had absorbed from Christ could be presented to her masters, “men learned in scripture.” She was better prepared than some experts in scripture to teach ­others about ­things of the spirit. When she protested that she was in no position to teach the g­ reat masters, Christ replied that she should indeed teach them about giving birth to him spiritually. It was by his ­will that she arrived unknown in Marienwerder and began speaking about him to her spiritual sons in orthodox terms, without their spurning her or saying, “Get away from us! We are well learned in sacred letters, and so we too know how to speak of the Lord God.”123 This repre­sen­ta­tion of Dorothea as a spiritual ­woman who could hold her own among scholars should not be surprising. During his years in Prague, 118. ​See Johannes Tauler, Sermon 51, in Predigten, trans. Georg Hofmann (Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1979), 2:389, on “reading masters” versus “living masters.” 119. ​VDM 1.4.f, p. 37. 120. ​VDM 1.3.i, p. 36; note shift; cf. 1.2.a and e–­f, pp. 32–33; cf. LDM 2.29, pp. 129–30; cf. 1.3.g, p. 35. 121. ​VDM 1.3.a, p. 34; S. Tommaso d’Aquino, Commento alle Sentenze di Pietro Lombardo, vol. 6, trans. Lorenzo Perotto (Bologna: Edizioni Studio Domenicano, 2000), p. 500, Solutio 1, “Christus secundum humanam naturam dicitur liber vitae.” Cf. AF Instructions, c. 34 (“in libro et superlibro vitae; qui liber vitae est tota vita Christi”), Lachance p. 302 (“the Book and the more-­than-­a-­book of Life”). 122. ​VDM 1.3.e, p. 35. 123. ​VDM 1.2.i, pp. 34–35; 1.4.c, p. 37; 1.4.h, p. 38; 1.4.i, pp. 38–39.



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Marienwerder had not only been a professor of theology but had been linked with ­others who shared an interest in holy ­women. Stephen Mossman has found that Marienwerder belonged to a circle of academics, closely connected to Archbishop Jan Jenštein, committed to pastoral care for w ­ omen seen as spiritually gifted.124 One of t­hese associates was Matthaeus of Cracow, who in a sermon for the Assumption had observed that w ­ omen are often more devout than men. He had served as confessor for a holy w ­ oman of Prague who received visions and other spiritual ­favors (often when she received communion), was often ill (especially when she abstained from communion), and gladly underwent persecution and suffering. Marienwerder and Matthaeus of Cracow ­were among the theologians consulted by the archbishop when he proposed to introduce the feast of the Visitation into his diocese.125 When he moved back to the town of Marienwerder, then, Johannes was prepared to find a w ­ oman who fit the model he would already have known. She may in fact have met a need of his to discover such a ­woman. But he would also have felt obliged and empowered to represent such a ­woman to his fellow academics as a figure they should re­spect and even revere. That was, in fact, the first ­thing he did in his longest life of Dorothea. He and she provided for each other the opportunity for what Dyan Elliott refers to as “a pro­cess of double authorization.”126 Dorothea’s assertion of her own status and Marienwerder’s assertion of her utility converged on a shared sense that Christ came to her as instructor who was meant to be heeded. While much of what Christ told her was practical instruction meant to regulate her life, t­ here was also revelation that could be construed as theological teaching, as revealed mystery, as revelation she was forbidden to disclose. Thus she understood a g­ reat deal about the mystery of the Trinity and would have been able to speak wondrously about it if she had been allowed, although what she said would have been incomprehensible to ­others. Marienwerder assures the reader that her teaching was not h ­ uman (secundum hominem) but revelation imparted by Christ. From early childhood she experienced knowledge of God and saw God’s glory in a kind of bright light, allowing her to perceive God’s majesty as if dimly and from far off.127 Christophany sometimes entailed teaching about ­matters of doctrine, and when it took that turn, it could give grounds for suspicion. The danger of ­actual heresy was, however, not a m ­ atter of concern so often as one might expect. The 124. ​Mossman, “Dorothea von Montau and the Masters of Prague,” 107. 125. ​Mossman, “Dorothea von Montau and the Masters of Prague,” 113–17. 126. ​Elliott, “Authorizing a Life,” 169. 127. ​LdF cc. 114, p. 193; 43, p. 74; 82, pp. 138–39; 76, pp. 128–29113, p. 192.

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mob accused Margery Kempe of “heresy,” but t­ hose who examined her quickly saw that she made no doctrinal pronouncement that qualified as heretical.128 The case is much the same for most of the figures we have examined. The case of Dorothea of Montau is particularly in­ter­est­ing in this regard. The revelations given to her might at times touch on ­matters of potential controversy. On the feast of the Virgin’s conception, Christ and the Virgin Mary herself revealed to Dorothea that the Virgin was conceived with original sin and was immediately cleansed, as vari­ous theologians (Bernard, Thomas, Alexander of Hales, and Bonaventure) asserted, for grace and guilt exist only in rational creatures, but the seminal mass is not rational, and when the Virgin’s soul was created and infused into her body, original sin was contracted from the infection pre­sent in the material of seed. When her soul was united with her body, she was infected and conceived in original sin, but she was cleansed at once by grace.129 On another occasion Dorothea wondered w ­ hether Christ’s heart was penetrated or wounded by the lance of Longinus, and Christ revealed to her that Longinus (“the blind Jew”) was no more able to harm his heart than when she touched hard steel with her fin­ger. Marienwerder noticed that on this point the revelation given to Dorothea was dif­fer­ent from what had been revealed to Birgitta of Sweden, and t­ here ­were discrepancies also in their revelations on the immaculate conception and on ­whether Christ was crucified with four or only three nails, so he had Dorothea inquire about ­these discrepancies. Christ said not to worry if his revelation to her did not accord fully with other revelations, since even the evangelists ­were not always in agreement on points of detail.130 Heresy strictly speaking does not seem to have been a serious concern. When she was still in Gdansk, Dorothea was charged at least informally with “heresy,” which prob­ably meant eccentricity more than doctrinal error. She could hardly have been suspect of Waldensian or Hussite heresy, and it would have taken an imaginative inquisitor to see in her a heretic of the ­Free Spirit. Still, she and her confessor ­were alert to the danger of her being misled. It is prob­ably no a coincidence that her main opponent in Gdansk was a canon 128. ​John H. Arnold, “Margery’s ­Trials: Heresy, Lollardy and Dissent,” in A Companion to the Book of Margery Kempe, ed. John H. Arnold and Katherine J. Lewis (Cambridge: Brewer, 2004), 75–93; Fiona Tolhurst, “The Radical, Yet Orthodox, Margery Kempe,” in Sacred and Profane in Chaucer and Late Medieval Lit­er­a­ture, ed. Robert Epstein and William Robins (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010), 179– 204; Genelle Gertz, Heresy ­Trials and En­glish ­Women Writers, 1400–1670 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 129. ​LdF c. 92, pp. 160–61; cf. c. 54, pp. 88–89, and c. 91, p. 158. See Hörner, Dorothea von Montau, especially 277–314. 130. ​LdF c. 54, pp. 88–89. The editor notes, p. 89, n5, that denial of the immaculate conception is found in the Dominican tradition, and this revelation was made on the feast of Saint Dominic.



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l­awyer, and her main defender was a theologian: while theologians defined heresy in terms of doctrine, canon ­lawyers tended to be more open to notions of heresy that had to do with reprobate be­hav­ior.131 Marienwerder depicts Dorothea as keenly aware of the possibility of deception and the need for what was called discernment of spirits. Christ himself assured her that he was the one who gave her revelations, not some false or seducing spirit.132 A skeptical reader might ask how she knew it was Christ and not a seducer who gave that assurance, but Marienwerder’s point is mainly that she was alert to the difference. She was aware of the evil spirit’s wiles, and for that reason she remained suspicious and wary against deception. Constant enjoyment of jubilus and other spiritual consolations put her on guard, and would have been grounds for suspicion if she did not also experience more complex and challenging spiritual states, such as fervent weeping.133 Around the time they began their recording of her experience, Marienwerder asked her how she knew her visions and revelations ­were true and not phantasmic, especially the revelations given to her in rapture, which t­hose bent on criticism might construe as dreams or phantasms. She replied that her revelations tended to kindle in her a love of God and neighbor, devotion, hatred of sin, and contempt for temporal ­things. If she came out from a state of rapture and found she was not kindled to fervent charity, she would not dare expose the ­things revealed to her.134 When Christ came to her, he removed from her “­every creaturely image,” ­every thought of created affairs, and this itself was a sign of his au­then­tic presence: “Where could ­there be room for error, when nothing other than God is allowed pre­sent?”135 When she did slip into error, it was on a m ­ atter of historical detail rather than of doctrine. On one occasion she failed to convey precisely what Christ had revealed to her, and for this he reproached and even punished her. She told Marienwerder “in her simplicity” that Christ suffered bodily when he was pierced with a lance, thinking this is what Christ himself had told her. Immediately Marienwerder pointed out that this could not have been the case, b­ ecause the lance wound was inflicted only ­after Christ’s death. As soon as he began saying t­ hese words, Dorothea herself was wounded by Christ, who caused the 131. ​O. Hageneder, “Der Häresiebegriff bei den Juristen des 12. und 13. Jahrhunderts,” in The Concept of Heresy in the ­Middle Ages (11th–13th C.), ed. W. Lourdaux and D. Verhelst (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1976), 42–103; Richard Kieckhefer, “Witchcraft, Necromancy and Sorcery as Heresy,” in Chasses aux sorcières et démonologie: entre discours et pratiques (XIVe–­XVIIe siècles), ed. Martine Ostorero, Georg Modestin, and Kathrin Utz Tremp (Florence: Sismel, 2010), 133–53, especially 145–49. 132. ​VDM 1.5.b, p. 40. 133. ​VDM 1.6.p, p. 45. 134. ​VDM 1.6.i, p. 43. 135. ​VDM 1.6.a, p. 41.

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sensation of a lance piercing her right shoulder and extending down to her heart (which to us might again signal a cardiac crisis). She clutched her hand to the point of entry and nearly fainted from the pain, then she realized Christ was punishing her for her misstatement. He then drew her into the wound in his own side, where it was so tight that she could neither exit nor turn around, and he assured her that Marienwerder’s statement about the lance wound was correct. The next day Christ told her he had inflicted that spiritual wound on her so she would know the truth about his post-­mortem lance wound, and he did not want any untruth credited to him.136 The point of the story might well be to dispel doubts about Dorothea’s orthodoxy, as if Marienwerder was saying implicitly that even on minor points her misstatements w ­ ere immediately self-­ correcting, which provides reassurance that she would not commit or persist in greater errors. She had, ­after all, been charged with heresy and threatened with the fate of a heretic, and even if this was an idle threat and she was never r­ eally thought guilty of false doctrine, it would not be surprising if Marienwerder meant to signal at least implicitly that this was not an issue.

The Solitary Death of Dorothea of Montau Dorothea lived much of her life in the expectation of a holy death, and during her time in reclusion this became a central theme in her discourse. Christ assured her that she would have eternal life, indeed that she would be a g­ reat saint. Many times he came to her as if he would ­free her soul from the prison of her body. For half a year before her death, she said often that she would die soon, although this “soon” was drawn out. She even asked her confessor to pray that she might die soon, but he asked where it was written that one person should pray for the death of another. Her spiritual sons asked her frequently, separately and together, that she might foretell the time of her death, and Marienwerder urged her to pray that Christ might graciously w ­ ill to reveal the time of her death.137 She had always tried to prepare well for feast days, and now Christ instructed her in preparation for death. He told her to say to her confessor that he had never met and would never meet a person so prepared for death as she. She should desire that he and his ­mother and a multitude of saints be with her at her death, and that her faithful friends also be with her. When she pleaded with 136. ​VDM 1.6.u, pp. 46–47. 137. ​VDM 7.9.b-­c, pp. 339–40; 7.9.e, p. 340; 7.25.b, p. 363; 7.10.c, p. 342; 7.25.a, p. 363. Cf. LDM 3.38, pp. 199–201; 3.36–37, pp. 197–99.



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him that her spiritual sons might indeed be with her, he said he would leave it to their ­free choice. She should not be anxious about her death or the presence of ­those close to her; he would be ­there with his ­mother and with saints. If she died in frenzy or unreason, t­ hose close to her would have cause for concern, for it would indicate that she was not on perfect terms with Christ. If she died alone, with no one e­ lse knowing she was passing, they should know that her death came from ­great love and desire, by Christ’s special dispensation.138 On the last day of her life, she received communion but had exceptionally keen hunger to receive it again, and she begged Marienwerder to give it to her. He reminded her that she had already received and could not do so a second time on the same day, so she should go ahead and have something to drink to refresh herself, but she said she could not take food or drink. He assured her he would come back a­ fter midnight, and then he would give her communion. In retrospect he realized that her craving to have communion twice in the day was a sign of her approaching death, but at the time he failed to register this premonition. She gave no further sign that she was closer to death than before. It was around time for compline, and the confessor noted that he had to be with his fellow canons. It seemed that she wanted him to stay with her, although she did not say so expressly. He said a friendly farewell, recommended himself to her prayers, and left, not knowing that he would not see her again in her earthly life.139 It was nearly seven hours ­later that he returned. He wondered at her silence, for often when he went to her at this time, she would be clamoring for communion, but, not realizing she was dead, he thought she was in rapture. ­Going back and forth, he peered in through the win­dow and screen of her cell to see if ­there was any sign of her returning from ecstasy. Fi­nally, realizing t­here was no sign of life, he understood what had happened. It was a cause of grief to him that he had left her and no one at all had been ­there to bear witness to her blessed death. He found her on her bed—­not as she had often been when in rapture, with her head to the east and her feet to the west, but with her head on a pillow to the west and her feet to the east, as was customary on funereal sculpture. She lay on her right side, her eyes shut, her feet covered, her right hand beneath her right cheek, her left arm fallen away slightly from her left side. She did not receive the sacrament of extreme unction, ­because her death came not from bodily illness (Marienwerder said) but from the languishing of love, as Christ had foretold.140 138. ​VDM 7.10.e, pp. 342–43; 7.12.f–­g, p. 346 7.13.d, p. 347; cf. LDM 3.39, pp. 202–3. 139. ​VDM 7.27.f–­g, pp. 367–68; cf. LDM 3.40–41, pp. 204–6. 140. ​VDM 7.28.a–­f, pp. 369–70; cf. LDM 3.42, pp. 207–9.

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Throughout his account, Marienwerder displays grief, if not quite guilt, at his not having been at Dorothea’s side when she died. She had wanted him to be ­there. He had wanted to be ­there. Christ had been unclear on the ­matter. ­There had been signs that she was about to die, but he had missed them. But of course he did need to be with his fellow canons for the divine office, and if her death was from mystical rather than physical ­causes, perhaps he was excused for not noticing her condition? All his agonizing points to unrelieved regret. Christ, his ­mother, and his saints may have been ­there to receive her soul, but the gathering of the earthly community that so typified the deathbed scene in monastic lit­er­a­ture was painfully absent: on that side of the divide ­there was not a single person pre­sent. The departure from the monastic deathbed scene is yet more complete, ­because t­ here is also no narrative of Christ and his retinue arriving from the other side to receive and welcome the soul of the ­dying w ­ oman. The account of spiritual presence relied on the context of mortal ­human presence, not only ­because someone had to have been ­there to see what was transpiring—as Christ had foretold Dorothea’s spiritual sons would be able to sense his presence through her—­but ­because the conventions of spiritual experience that transmit the realities of that experience are ultimately always social, and the social network that Dorothea enjoyed was too narrow to bear the cultural weight expected of it.

Conclusion Dorothea’s solitary death brings to a poignant conclusion her complicated relationship with Marienwerder and brings into focus issues of gender that are obviously relevant to her life, in more than one way. When Marienwerder portrays her as a bride of Christ, he is drawing on idealizing conventions often invoked by male hagiographers to show a status beyond that of just any nun, to show her as grounded in yet transcending the ordinary status of the religious w ­ oman, and as her director he basks in the glow he sees emanating from her. When he shows her as the ­bearer of revealed truths, he suggests that an uneducated ­woman can teach academics in spiritual m ­ atters, and at the same time he validates her own claims to dignity in his role as the one who validates her revelation and keeps it ­under control. It is when he tells of her daily routine and Christ’s role in it that he allows her own voice to come through with the most particularity and the least filtering of hagiographic convention, but it is ­here that we see submissiveness most fully routinized. Having lived in an abusive, controlling marriage for many years, Dorothea found herself in a relationship with Christ that seems to have been no less controlling and arguably as brutal. It is difficult to see the rela-



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tionship as empowering, and even simply to call it oppressive would be to underestimate Dorothea’s embrace of routinized superintendence, with all the approval, disapproval, and discipline that it entailed. At the end, when she could expect no h ­ uman companionship other than Marienwerder’s, he was absent, and the pain he had celebrated as mystical benefaction brought her to a death that she presumably welcomed with her long practiced and deeply ingrained habit of submission. Dorothea in her cell is far removed from the world of Helfta, with its exuberant culture of shared liturgy and communal support even in sickness and ­dying. She is distant as well from the h ­ ouses of Dominican nuns who still upheld much of the spirit seen in the lit­er­a­ture of Helfta. Neither an ordinary parishioner nor a nun, she experienced the presence of Christ in ways that might have perplexed and even have shocked some of the figures we have discussed. Her amply documented experience, however, claims a place in the history of late medieval Christophany, illustrating dramatically how Christ’s mystical presence could be depicted in many modes, responding to differences in context and in personality.

C h a p te r   1 0

The Problematics of Presence

For a modern reader, Dorothea of Montau’s life may raise issues: her patient submission to her husband, to Marienwerder, and to Christ may seem problematic; her own scrupulous attention to the minute obligations she saw Christ as setting upon her may appear obsessive; Marienwerder’s repre­sen­ta­tion of her mystical ­favors and afflictions may seem heavy-­ handed and insensitive to the realities of her life, including her medical condition. ­These, however, w ­ ere not the issues that most concerned late medieval writers and readers. ­There ­were other ­matters they did find troubling. Intuition could be vague, fleeting, and uncertain. Further, the tendency to remember and report intuition in terms of perception could be unreliable and misleading. Recognizing ­these prob­lems, late medieval Christians w ­ ere alert to the possibilities of false memory, self-­deception, illusion and delusion, and deliberate invention. Critical observers raised ­these issues, and the subjects themselves could be keenly aware of t­ hese risks. Indeed, the stakes could be higher for them than most modern readers would assume: Margery Kempe and ­others feared that the voices they heard ­were not that of Christ, nor the product of some m ­ ental disturbance, but seductive demonic voices.1 Further complicating m ­ atters, the presence of Christ might seem unstable, liable to 1. ​BMK 1.59 (Windeatt, 184–85); Richard Kieckhefer, Unquiet Souls: Fourteenth-­Century Saints and Their Religious Milieu (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 175. 32 2

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withdrawal, and absence might call into question the genuineness of presence. All ­these issues ­were on the minds of pious Christians in the late medieval West, and b­ ecause both the claims and the doubts ­were more prominently voiced in the cultural mainstream, the difficulties must have loomed larger than they do for modern readers.

The Power of Suggestion When Christ’s presence is intuited and then perceived, the obvious critique is that one is experiencing the power of suggestion. This is not exclusively a modern suspicion: Mechthild of Hackeborn faced the possibility squarely. She heard a voice speak to her during mass on Pentecost, but she said to herself, “­These words are not from God. Perhaps they have come from your own soul consoling itself.” The response came at once that the words ­were indeed divine, “­because your soul is mine, and my soul is yours,” bonded in love more than the souls of Jonathan and David (I Samuel 18:1).2 The voice did not deny what she said; it left open the possibility that she was responding to the power of suggestion. But even if the revelation came from Mechthild’s consciousness, or from what we might prefer to speak of as her subconscious mind, that did not make it less authentically revelatory, ­because Mechthild and Christ ­were one, and he did speak in and through her, at all levels of her consciousness.3 A similar passage occurs in the writings associated with Gertrude of Helfta. She had asked Christ what profit ­humans gain from having angels join them in psalm singing. At first she received no response. Then “through divine inspiration” she realized that when angels join in ­human worship, they pray that the h ­ umans may be like them. Immediately she feared that this solution had come “not from the spirit of God but from her own understanding.” The response to that fear was similar to what Mechthild had heard, but not exactly the same: she heard the words, “Do not be afraid: ­because your ­will is so fully united to my own divine w ­ ill that you cannot w ­ ill anything except what I 4 ­will.” The focus h ­ ere is not on shared understanding but on the u ­ nion of 2. ​LSG 1.23 (Newman, 91); the text speaks of “the Lord,” and “God,” but ­later in the chapter he is explic­itly identified as “the Lord Jesus.” 3. ​Mary Jeremy Finnegan, The ­Women of Helfta: Scholars and Mystics (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991), 28, 42, on LSG 2.12, p. 143 (Newman, 126–27), and 5.7, pp. 318–19; see also Anna Harrison, “ ‘Oh! What Trea­sure Is in This Book?’: Writing, Reading, and Community at the Monastery of Helfta,” Viator 39 (2008): 84; Rebecca Krug, “Jesus’ Voice: Dialogue and Late Medieval Readers,” in Form and Reform: Reading Across the Fifteenth ­Century, ed. Shannon Gayk and Kathleen Tonry (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2011), 110–29. 4. ​LDP 4.2.14–15 (Barratt, 19–20).

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Gertrude’s ­will with Christ’s. Mechthild had been told her soul was joined to Christ’s in such a way that the words she heard could be ascribed to him even if they came from her. In Gertrude’s case the ­union of ­wills is taken to guarantee not the source of the answer she has been given but rather the outcome of the pro­cess she has been inspired to think of: even if the angelic aid that comes to her mind is something she has conceived b­ ecause she w ­ ills it, that does not m ­ atter, b­ ecause Christ too w ­ ills it, and it w ­ ill come about as she has conceived. In a l­ater passage, Gertrude asked Christ (who speaks h ­ ere of his divine and ­human natures, and who takes credit for having created her) how to go about constructing an ark analogous to Noah’s.5 He gave her a set of spiritual exercises to follow; that w ­ ill be her equivalent of the ark. Then, realizing that this instruction came in response to her request, she asked how she can know it came from him, the best teacher. He pointed out that he who created her senses for his ser­vice was the one who perfected the gift he had given her for the sake of more diligent exertion. He had given her the gift of pious thought and perfected this gift so that she might be capable of such diligent exertion.6 In other words, he was the source of her capacity. She went on to say that by that criterion anyone could come up with fancies of their own and claim them as authoritative. To which Christ replied that t­ hose whose w ­ ill is fully united with his “may affirm what­ever good they apprehend by the exercise of their senses, with inward relish,” provided it is consonant with scripture and useful for ­others. What Gertrude feared h ­ ere was not the danger of heterodox teaching; she was urged to affirm something as good, not to assert something as true. Her initial instinct was that a divine source is the surest guarantee of good spiritual practice. Christ’s first response was that the exercise of the senses and the capacity for thoughtful and pious use of sensory images is itself his gift; his second reply was that what­ever this exercise produces may be accepted as good, and thus at least indirectly derived from him, so long as the ­will in its quest for the good is united with his own w ­ ill, and so long as the pious practice is scripturally sound and socially useful. His response seems to lead away from the question of source and ­toward alternative criteria of validity, but the require-

5. ​LDP 4.14.5. Cf. Richard of St Victor, “The Mystical Ark,” in The Twelve Patriarchs, The Mystical Ark, Book Three of the Trinity, trans. Grover A. Zinn (New York: Paulist, 1979), 149–370. 6. ​The Latin reads, “Cur . . ob hoc debet donum meum parvipendi, si cum sensibus tuis, quos ad serviendum mihi creavi diligentiori studio illud perfeci.” The gift (donum) ­here must be the capacity for pious thought that should not be under-­esteemed (or not recognized as a divine gift). Christ says he has created her senses for his ser­vice. He then says he had perfected “that” (illud), which must refer to the gift, and diligentiori studio should prob­ably be taken as dative, meaning he has perfected the gift for the sake of the exertion.

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ment of a ­will united with his actually serves to guarantee that the capacity given by him is also guided by conformity with his ­will.7

Christophany u ­ nder Critique If manifestations of Christ’s presence could be doubted by t­ hose who received them, they w ­ ere also liable to skepticism by ­others who heard of them. This prob­lem would prob­ably not have arisen if reports had remained couched in the language of intuition—if the recipients had said, in effect, “I prayed to Christ and it seemed to me that he gave me this reassurance,” or “he inspired me with this insight.” The stronger language of perception was more open to skepticism and critique. Christophany was part of the deep heritage of Chris­tian­ity, ­going back to the first c­ entury, and it was also subject for doubt and disbelief, again ­going back to the first ­century and the story of Saint Thomas. In the fifth ­century, Palladius told in his Historia lausiaca (The Lausiac History) of a monk who mistook the Antichrist for Christ and claimed he did not need to receive Christ in communion ­because he had seen him in person. To correct his pride, the other monks put him in iron bonds for a year.8 The prob­lem was perennial. The kinds of vision narrated in the sister-­books, especially ­those of the Christ child, came in for harsh criticism from vari­ous quarters.9 When Albert the G ­ reat heard of a w ­ oman who claimed she had suckled Jesus, he proclaimed that it was folly rather than heresy but still worthy of punishment.10 The Franciscans Lamprecht of Regensburg and David of Augsburg warned that experiences of this kind w ­ ere hazardous, especially among w ­ omen, and could easily 11 be the result of self-­deception or demonic illusion. In the mystical dialogue 7. ​Finnegan, The ­Women of Helfta, 83; Jessica Barr, Willing to Know God: Dreamers and Visionaries in the L­ ater ­Middle Ages (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2010), 89–92, discusses t­hese two passages from Gertrude and gives an interpretation slightly dif­fer­ent from (perhaps complementary to) mine. 8. ​Palladius, The Lausiac History, trans. W. K. Lowther Clarke (London: SPCK, 1918). For an unexpected Jewish analogue, see Elisheva Baumgarten, Practicing Piety in Medieval Ashkenaz: Men, W ­ omen, and Everyday Religious Observance (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 95, regarding a young Jew who was “tempted by a ghost bearing a cross who urged him to convert to Chris­tian­ity.” 9. ​This paragraph appeared ­earlier in my article “Ihesus ist unser!: The Christ Child in the German ­Sister Books,” in The Christ Child in Medieval Culture: Alpha es et O!, ed. Mary Dzon and Theresa M. Kenney (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012), 167–98. 10. ​Herbert Grundmann, Religious Movements in the ­Middle Ages: The Historical Links between Heresy, the Mendicant ­Orders, and the ­Women’s Religious Movement in the Twelfth and Thirteenth ­Century, with the Historical Foundations of German Mysticism, trans. Steven Rowan (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995), 176. 11. ​Stephen Mossman, Marquard von Lindau and the Challenges of Religious Life in Late Medieval Germany: The Passion, the Eucharist, the Virgin Mary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 227–29.

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Schwester Katrei, the fictitious ­Sister Catherine rails against ­those who beg for an external (meaning bodily) vision, perceptible with the outer (or bodily) eyes, of Christ as he was when he was a child or ­later. Wishing to boast and enjoy consolation, they fast and pray and perform other works, appearing holy, and hoping to be rewarded with such visions. But the Devil deceives them, taking ele­ments from the air to fashion a simulacrum of a curly-­haired child in the consecrated host, or a youth of twelve years, or a man of thirty years. ­Those who listen to him are “the most accursed folk ever born.” What they claim to experience is impossible, ­because ever since the ascension, no one has seen Christ with bodily perception. And when p­ eople claim to have seen the Virgin with her child, this too is an error; since her bodily assumption into heaven, she too has never been seen with bodily eyes.12 (But of course most late medieval visions are said to involve inner rather than bodily sensation, a claim that S­ ister Catherine seems not to take into account.) If medieval ­people knew about the power of suggestion, they also knew about self-­deception, fraud, and demonic deception.13 They knew that revelations could be tendentious and po­liti­cal: both the revelations and the sanctity of Birgitta of Sweden w ­ ere subject of controversy, partly b­ ecause she was a partisan in the G ­ reat Schism.14 The discernment of spirits, or discretio spirituum (a phrase taken from I Corinthians 12:10), had been discussed often in the context of monastic spirituality, but in the late medieval West it became subject m ­ atter for special treatment in response particularly to ­women’s claims of revelation. It was not ­until 1401 that Jean Gerson wrote specifically on the prob­lem of distinguishing between true and false revelations,15 but al12. ​“The ‘­Sister Catherine’ Treatise,” sect. 6, trans. Elvira Borgstädt, in Meister Eckhart: Teacher and Preacher, ed. Bernard McGinn (New York: Paulist, 1986), 374–75. 13. ​Dyan Elliott, “True Presence / False Christ: The Antinomies of Embodiment in Medieval Spirituality,” Mediaeval Studies 64 (2002): 254–58; David Lawton, “Voice a­ fter Arundel,” in ­After Arundel: Religious Writing in Fifteenth-­Century ­England, ed. Vincent Gillespie and Kantik Ghosh (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011), 138; Christian Folini, Katharinental und Töss: Zwei mystische Zentren in sozialgeschichtlicher Perspektive (Zürich: Chronos, 2007), 359–62. 14. ​Päivi Salmesvuori, Power and Sainthood: The Case of Birgitta of Sweden (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); André Vauchez, The Laity in the M ­ iddle Ages: Religious Beliefs and Devotional Practices, ed. Daniel E. Bornstein, trans. Margery J. Schneider (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993), 43–53, focuses on Birgitta and Catherine of Siena. 15. ​Paschal Boland, The Concept of ‘Discretio spirituum’ in John Gerson’s “De probatione spirituum” and “De distinctione verarum visionum a falsis” (Washington, DC: Catholic University of Amer­i­ca Press, 1959); Cornelius Roth, Discretio spirituum: Kriterien geistlicher Unterscheidung bei Johannes Gerson (Würzburg: Echter, 2001); Ulla Williams and Werner Williams-­Krapp, “Eine Warnung an alle, dy sych etwaz duncken: Der ‘Sendbrief vom Betrug teuflicher Erscheinungen’ (mit einer Edition),” in Forschungen zur deutschen Literatur des Spätmittelalters: Festschrift für Johannes Janota, ed. Horst Brunner and Werner Williams-­Krapp (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2003), 167–89; Dyan Elliott, “Seeing Double: John Gerson, the Discernment of Spirits, and Joan of Arc,” American Historical Review 107 (2002): 26–54; Elliott, “True Presence / False

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ready in 1199 Pope Innocent III had called for “greater discernment” in spiritual ­matters, in 1383 Heinrich of Langenstein had written De discretione spirituum (On the discernment of spirits), and o ­ thers had been writing in this vein.16 Even saints needed such discernment, ­because they often had visions purportedly of Christ or of angels, and they themselves ­were often terrified at the prospect that they might be visited by demons in disguise. In hagiography the point was not to test the spirits but to show the saintly figure as herself alert to the issues.17 The concern was not so much to answer as to forestall the critics. The earliest fully developed warning about the need for discernment was that of Henry of Friemar in the early ­fourteenth ­century. Even the title of this work is significant: Tractatus de quattuor instinctibus, scilicet divino, angelico, diabolico et naturali (A treatise on four instincts, namely divine, angelic, diabolical, and natu­ral). The work deals with inner impulses, with “fourfold instinct or inner movement” (qua­dru­plex . . . ​instinctus sive motio interior) that can be divine or angelic in origin but may also be diabolical or natu­ral. It is not ­limited to visions but extends to a wider range of influences that call for discernment, many of which could be labeled intuitions rather than perceptions. Impulses coming from the Devil or demons are usually subtle but still clearly ascribable (from a mainstream Christian perspective) to demonic temptation, and the other “instincts” may be likewise subtle rather than overtly super­ natural. The first sign of divine instinct is that it leads a person to follow more closely the example of Christ and of the saints. The second is that it leads to humility. The third is that it induces a person to focus his or her mind and heart; it leads a person away from the tumult of outward society and lures one back to simplicity and unity of heart, away from outward and back to inward

Christ,” 249; Mossman, Marquard von Lindau, 229–31; Gábor Klaniczay, “Learned Systems and Popu­lar Narratives of Vision and Bewitchment,” in Witchcraft Mythologies and Persecutions: Demons, Spirits, Witches, ed. Gábor Klaniczay and Éva Pócs (Budapest: Central Eu­ro­pean University Press, 2008), 3:58. 16. ​Rosalynn Voaden, God’s Words, W ­ omen’s Voices: The Discernment of Spirits in the Writing of Late-­ Medieval W ­ omen Visionaries (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 1999); Nancy Caciola, Discerning Spirits: Divine and Demonic Possession in the ­Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003); Dyan Elliott, Proving W ­ oman: Female Spirituality and Inquisitional Culture in the ­Later ­Middle Ages (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2004); Wendy Love Anderson, The Discernment of Spirits: Assessing Visions and Visionaries in the Late M ­ iddle Ages (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2011); McGinn, “Visions and Visualizations,” 240–45. 17. ​See, for example, Friar Johannes O.P. of Magdeburg, “The Life of Margaret the Lame,” trans. Gertrud Jaron Lewis and Tilman Lewis, in Living Saints of the Thirteenth ­Century: The Lives of Yvette, Anchoress of Huy; Juliana of Cornillon, Author of the Corpus Christi Feast; and Margaret the Lame, Anchoress of Magdeburg, ed. Anneke B. Mulder-­Bakker (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011), c. 67, p. 389: “It is difficult to know ­whether it is God or the devil speaking to the soul, or one’s own thoughts.” See also the life of B ­ rother Juniper, in The L­ ittle Flowers of St Francis of Assisi, trans. T. W. Arnold (London: Chatto & Windus, 1908), 88–108; the vita also tells of Christ himself appearing on other occasions: 39–40, 141–47.

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­ atters. The fourth is an enrichment in virtues.18 Of all the writings in this m lit­er­at­ ure on discernment of spirits, Henry’s is perhaps the one that touches most closely on the spectrum that includes intuition as well as perception. It is relatively easy from a modern perspective to recognize that claims about visions could be suspect, and it may seem reassuring that medieval Christians could be critical of claims about the super­natural. Their capacity for criticism makes them more like us; even when they spoke of demonic deception where we might speak of ­mental illness, their critical approach to claims of revelation is less alien to post-­Enlightenment readers than the approbation that may come across as credulity. The harder challenge for modern readers is not to see how medieval p­ eople could be critical, but to gain some understanding of how they could take reports of the super­natural seriously even while at the same time taking a nuanced view of psychological pro­cess.

Modes of Presence and Absence Being understood as God, and thus ubiquitous, Christ was always pre­sent in princi­ple, but he could be pre­sent in several distinguishable modes: physically pre­sent in the consecrated bread and wine, mystically pre­sent in the Church as his body, pre­sent incognito in beggars needing food and clothing, pre­sent intermittently as the mystical bridegroom, pre­sent as a source of comforting reassurance, as a chastising judge who would come on the Last Day to execute final judgment, as the ever and everywhere pre­sent Word. He might be sensed pre­sent in one mode but not o ­ thers. His presence might be accepted as a m ­ atter of faith but not felt. E ­ very mode of presence assumed at least theoretically a correlative mode of absence. The host might turn out not to have been consecrated, or if it was once consecrated, ­there might be anxiety about the permanence of sacramental presence.19 His comfort might be felt one day but not the next. An unbeliever might take his absence as absolute, meaning that he was pre­sent in none of the vari­ous modes, but when the devout spoke of him as absent, that was not what they had in mind. It would be more 18. ​ Der Traktat Heinrichs von Friemar über die Unterscheidung der Geister: Lateinisch-­mittelhochdeutsche Textausgabe mit Untersuchungen, ed. Robert G. Warnock and Adolar Zumkeller (Würzburg: Augustinus-­ Verlag, 1977), 154–66. 19. ​A fresh host was required at Wilsnack alongside the miraculous hosts ­because of such a concern; see Folkhard Cremer, Die St. Nikolaus-­und Heiligblut-­Kirche zu Wilsnack (1383–1552): Eine Einordnung ihrer Bauformen in die Kirchenarchitektur zwischen Verden und Chorin, Doberan und Meißen im Spiegel bischöflicher und landesherrlicher Auseinandersetzung (Munich: Scaneg, 1996), 1:185.

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to the point to say that they sought his intuited or perceived presence and ­were not satisfied with a presence that was merely presupposed.20 While the vita of Margaret of Cortona reports extended dialogues between her and Christ, it also reports in several passages that she took consolation and delight from his mere presence, even without communication. She said to Christ that nothing could fully refresh her except his presence. Bystanders seeing her in rapture supposed she could discern his presence.21 But the vita also speaks about times when that consciousness of presence was taken away, ­because Christ, like a lender, could withdraw his ­favors.22 Withdrawal of Christ’s consolation was more difficult for her than bodily suffering or moral temptation; indeed, when she was deprived of his presence, she felt as if she ­were in hell.23 The text makes a clear distinction, however, between his presence and her awareness of the effects of that presence. He was always with her, although she could not always feel the effect of his presence. Or, as he told her: “I ­will be and I w ­ ill not be with you. Although my grace ­will clothe you, you w ­ ill feel naked, b­ ecause I w ­ ill not allow you to be aware of me. I prefer that you remain in a state of fear in order that you may increase in grace.”24 The deprivation could be ascribed to her transgressions, however minor. On one occasion she could feel Christ’s presence but could not hear him speaking to her, and it became clear that he was punishing her for hesitating slightly in her obedience to her confessor.25 ­There is no clear distinction h ­ ere between presence and absence. ­There are times when Christ is pre­sent to Margaret but she cannot sense his presence. And ­there are times when she can sense his presence but cannot hear him. If she could see him but not hear him, it might seem as if he was simply giving her a ­silent treatment even when sensibly pre­sent, but that seems not quite the situation, b­ ecause she does not say she could see him. It is prob­ably more accurate to say that in some situations she was able to intuit his presence but the intuition remained vague and did not attain the clarity of perception. In any case, rather than speaking simply about presence and absence we must recognize that for Margaret as for ­others ­there ­were dif­fer­ent modes of presence, and the withdrawal of any mode meant a correlative form of absence. 20. ​Robert A. Orsi, History and Presence (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 6–8, recognizes the dialectic of presence and absence as a key theme in experience and theology, but suggests that presence is “the norm of h ­ uman existence, including in religion,” while “absence is an authoritative imposition.” 21. ​VMC 5.2 (Renna, 106); cf. 5.17 (Renna, 126), 5.2 (Renna, 106); cf. 5.17 (Renna, 126). 22. ​VMC 4.21 (Renna, 103). 23. ​VMC 5.23 (Renna, 132). 24. ​VMC 5.33 (Renna, 140). 25. ​VMC 4.16 (Renna, 97).

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The ambiguity is familiar from more ordinary forms of experience. Prayers addressed to Christ typically presuppose that he is pre­sent spiritually and able to receive the prayer, yet not manifest perceptibly, let alone in bodily form or as a historical character. B ­ ecause he is not pre­sent in a way that is familiar from everyday experience, it is easy for even a pious person to sense him as absent, or, in an alternative formulation, to perceive oneself as absent from him. “You w ­ ere with me, but I was not with you,” Augustine says to God in the Confessions,26 and the Christian acknowledging Christ’s spiritual presence may not feel spiritually adequate to receive that presence. When Ludolf of Saxony, writing in the ­fourteenth c­ entury, prays to Christ, “May I ever perceive you dwelling within me by grace,” even the capacity to perceive Christ’s presence by grace is itself a grace for which he prays.27 The difference for someone like Margaret of Cortona is that ­there are times when she does claim to perceive the voice of Christ, and when he steps back from that mode of perceptible presence, he seems to absent himself from her. For t­ hose who received communication from Christ, the form of absence that weighed most heavi­ly was his mystical withdrawal. He could be pre­sent but not manifest. His presence could be real but not realized. In the Song of Songs (especially 3:1–3), the bridegroom withdraws from the bride and ­causes her to seek frantically for him. He has lavished his praise upon her and called her away into the flowering fields, but now he is gone. In mystical texts this withdrawal is taken to represent times of spiritual dryness or emptiness, dark and troubling phases in the spiritual life when the divine presence is not manifest. Ideally, the bridegroom’s absence makes the bride’s heart grow fonder. In any case, it is not simply the presence of Christ that is cherished but the manifest, realized, experienced presence, and how an individual reacts to the withdrawal of that ­favor is often the greatest test of worthiness. Christ was said to be pre­sent to Mechthild of Hackeborn at all times. He might seem absent, but his absence was subjective only, an illusion she had to overcome. She might not sense him pre­sent, but if she desired his presence she saw him standing by her with his heart opened like a door leading to a large ­house. When she failed to sense him by grace, she sought him and found him standing in a silver portal and saying to her, “Enter into the joy of your 26. ​Saint Augustine, Confessions, 10.27, trans. R. S. Pine-­Coffin (Harmonds­worth: Penguin, 1961), 231–32. 27. ​Sr. Mary Immaculate Bodenstedt, Praying the Life of Christ: First En­glish Translation of the Prayers Concluding the 181 Chapters of Ludolphus the Carthusian: The Quintessence of His Devout Meditations on the Life of Christ (Salzburg: Institut für Englische Sprache und Literatur, 1973), 87.

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Lord” (Matthew 21:23).28 One might have thought the intuition was insufficient for one who sought to perceive Christ pre­sent, but ­here it is the sense or feeling of presence that is sought, and the vision is an invitation to approach him in a way that ­will restore the feeling that is missed. Gertrude Rickeldey also experienced Christ’s absence in a way that led to paradox. He hid himself and caused her “­great turmoil, sorrow, and pain.” She might go a long time without revelations. For about half a year he withdrew his presence and consolations from her. Yet she said his presence was more frightening than his harshness, ­because the latter was what she deserved.29 As a hedge against vainglory, Christ sometimes withdrew experience of his presence from Margery Kempe. Even so, he remained pre­sent to her, “for I am a hidden God in you.”30 Expanding on this assurance, he said wherever God is, ­there heaven is, and God is in her soul, with angels guarding it constantly, and w ­ hether she went to church, to meal, to bed, or out of town, he was with her everywhere. He was like the sun, sometimes seen in the sky, sometimes hidden by clouds, but even then shedding brightness and warmth. ­Later in the book Margery again reports that Christ is a “hidden God” within her.31 But this presence to her and within her must be seen in the context of his being pre­sent literally everywhere, as she acknowledges elsewhere: if he is pre­sent to her, that is at least partly b­ ecause he is pre­sent everywhere.32 He once thanked her for considering it such a long time that she had been away from his presence, but she should not to be weary of him or of sitting alone and thinking of his love.33 Consciousness of presence was occasion for devotion; absence of that consciousness, perceived as consciousness of absence, was occasion for longing, and thus for even deeper devotion. In Mechthild of Magdeburg’s Flowing Light, the twelfth chapter in Book 4 is of par­tic­u­lar interest as the passage in which Mechthild speaks expressly and fully about “estrangement” from God. She begins by speaking of herself as resting in ­union with her lover, God, “the holy complete Trinity,” but as she 28. ​LSG 3.1, p. 195, Newman, pp. 147–49; LSG 4.8, pp. 264–66, Newman, pp. 167–68: “non sentiret” or “minime sentiret.” 29. ​Anneke B. Mulder-­Bakker, The Dedicated Spiritual Life of Upper Rhine Noble ­Women: A Study and Translation of a Fourteenth-­Century Spiritual Biography of Gertrude Rickeldey of Ortenberg and Heilke of Staufenberg (Turnhout: Brepols, 2017), c. 8, p. 137; c. 16, pp. 177–78; c. 27, p. 224. 30. ​“For I am an hyd God in þe.” 31. ​BMK 1.84 (Windeatt, 243): “whan þow gost to chyrch, I go wyth þe; whan þu syttest at þi mete, I sytte wyth þe; whan þow gost to þi bed, I go wyth þe; &, whan þu gost owt of towne, I go wyth þe.” 32. ​BMK 1.54 (Windeatt, 169–70). 33. ​BMK 1.65 (Windeatt, 198–200): “for þu thynkyst so long þat þu art owt of my blyssed presens.”

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sleeps in this u ­ nion, her lover abandons her. Nothing can console her—­not the created world, not the kingdom of heaven, not the saints. Nothing, that is, except “God’s Son,” and she begs him to open for her “the playful flood flowing in the Holy Trinity.” She speaks then of the delights she has enjoyed in being consoled by God over eight years and how she has found his consolation greater than she could endure, too good for her. Recognizing her unworthiness, she has sunk down to the level of damned souls, and even this was too good. God pursued her, but she asked him to leave her and let her sink down further. She entered a ­g reat darkness and “knew nothing of God’s intimacies.” Estrangement from God became complete, and she cried out, “Welcome, very blessed Estrangement,” asking God to take delight from her while she had estrangement from him, ­because “now God is strangely with me, now his estrangement from me is more welcome to me than he is himself,” and God would console her even in that estrangement. At this point Christ offered to cool the heat of his divinity, the longing of his humanity, and the plea­sure of his Holy Spirit in her, to which she consented so long as it was good for him only and not for her. When Lady Pain came to her, it was Christ who greeted her, recognizing her as the garment he wore next to his skin while he was on earth. Again she cried out: “Ah, blessed Estrangement from God, how bound I am to you in love! You strengthen my ­will in pain and make pleasant for me the difficult long wait in this miserable body. By what­ever means I make myself more your companion, the more intensely and wondrously God falls over me.” But her abandonment by God did not distance her from Christ, ­because he (having himself experienced that abandonment) was the one who came to her and recognized her estrangement as the price to be paid in life for the reconciliation to come.34 In effect her abandonment by God is what drives her into the arms of Christ, the one who shows her by word and example how suffering redeems.

Conclusion The issues discussed in this chapter—­the dangers of autosuggestion, pathological or demonic delusion, and the fear of Christ’s absence—­are varied, but they all have to do with the prob­lems that arise when individuals experience or report exceptional revelatory moments. Such ­people may not be believed. They may not trust themselves. The high points of their experience may bring apprehension of low points to come. In princi­ple the routines of everyday 34. ​FLG 4.12, pp. 258–67 (Tobin, 152–56).

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p­ iety and the extravagances of singular devotion are mutually supportive. Habituation to routine provides the background against which intuitions and perceptions arise. Recognizing Christ as divine underscores that he is ubiquitously pre­sent and accessible to the prayers of all. The presence of Christ generally recognized lends itself to more dramatic manifestation, which then corroborates the common agreement on his presence. The possibility of communicating with Christ means that he can be of use to individuals who need guidance or reassurance, but also to communities of fellow nuns or townspeople, who may come to recognize the singular individual as a channel of divine communication to o ­ thers, possibly even a saint. But in practice t­here are pitfalls on all sides. When Christ promised Anna Vorhtlin that he would be with her amid all the difficulties of her office as prioress, it may not have occurred to her that his being pre­sent might itself become an issue, but sometimes it did. One might speculate that the mystical presence of Christ—­his constant and habitual presence and availability for communication—­became less prominent ­after the long f­ourteenth ­century and to some extent became conventionalized in scripted dialogues, b­ ecause ­these prob­lems seemed so formidable. If so, this was one way the complex relationship between exceptional and ordinary piety became challenging and called for rethinking. Religion may feed on the inspiration that passes down from religious geniuses such as Mechthild of Magdeburg or Catherine of Siena, but equally it may derive strength from the conventional piety that sanctifies social cohesion, and t­ hese aspects of religion are not always in harmony. The burgeoning devotionalism of the late medieval West brought a proliferation of devout conventions but also encouraged unconventional experiences and claims. The religion of that period allures not only ­because it brought unpre­ce­dented variety but also ­because its tensions and ambiguities are themselves cause for fascination. Still, to the extent that post-­Enlightenment views of religion focus on the problematics, they can obscure what is worth recovering: the ways late medieval depiction of Christ’s mystical presence gave expression to a richly articulated culture that wove together the experience of individuals with that of communities, a culture that si­mul­ta­neously distinguished exceptional piety from more ordinary forms and held them in relationship to each other.

Conclusion Connected Themes in Late Medieval Religion

The mystical presence of Christ—­his manifest presence integrated into the lives of par­tic­ul­ar devout and even saintly individuals—­has now been viewed from multiple perspectives. All of them, however, are ways of seeing the phenomenon as exceptional yet grounded in ordinary experience. And all t­hese perspectives can be viewed as corollaries to the two main points of analy­sis, first the character of the Christ who is manifested, and second the ways late medieval texts show the presence of Christ as presupposed, intuited, and perceived. The first of ­these themes pertains to Christ himself, and the second to ­those who experience his presence. As for the repre­sen­ta­tion of Christ himself, we begin with the striking fact that, in an age widely assumed to be intensely devoted to the humanity of Christ, he is insistently spoken of as “God,” and his divinity is not incidental but impor­tant to late medieval Christians. In popu­lar parlance it is commonplace to speak of the consecrated host as the body of God, to call a hospital the ­house of God (meaning Christ), to say that God lay in the manger or hung on the cross. This is not simply a popu­lar distortion of classical Christology; it is faithful to the theology articulated at the councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon. When thirteenth-­century texts speak of Christophany, they often do so in complicated terms, balancing in vari­ous ways the divine and h ­ uman natures and in the pro­cess making clear that they are speaking of the person who bears both natures. The fourteenth-­century texts we have examined, even 33 4



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works of affective piety such as the book of Margery Kempe, are more likely to emphasize the divinity of Christ. But still it becomes clear that they are referring to the person who ­will at times speak of his own dual nature. If the divinity is accentuated, that is most basically ­because it is prior to the assumed humanity, but also b­ ecause in meditation on the historical life of Christ the sufferings he experienced are more poignant if it is clear that the eternally divine person assumed a ­human nature so as to undergo ­these torments, and in ­later Christophany it is impor­tant that this person have the capacity to transcend temporal constraints, to be pre­sent at all times and accessible at any time, and endowed with the power needed to reassure and protect. He refers at times to his own historical life in the past tense, and sometimes a Christ who is manifestly divine speaks of the time when he was more manifestly ­human, although then as now he is a single person with both natures. Other themes we have explored hinge on this recognition that Christ is an eternally divine person who assumed a ­human nature. If the historical Christ can be projected forward in time and become manifested as a child or as the Man of Sorrows, this is pos­si­ble ­because his eternity has a transtemporal dimension: as God he is capable of leaping over the centuries and bearing with him the humanity he has assumed. Even when he appears as the child Christ, he reveals the wisdom (and the playfulness) of the eternal Word. It is also ­because the divine person is eternal but capable of entering into the ­human situation that he can be pre­sent in his incarnation but also in “inculturation,” adapting himself in both cases to the particularities of h ­ uman culture and answering to the needs of mortals. He can enter into the experience of mortals as a person only, or he can do so as a person and also a personality, manifesting his variability, his personal history, and his capacity for relationship. In e­ ither case he is both divine and h ­ uman; the person ordinarily received in communion is the full Christ, body and blood, soul and divinity. When he is manifested with the full force of personality, that may involve aspects of his history that required his assumed ­human nature: he could not have suffered as he did without entering into flesh. Yet Christ even as God could be capable of revealing a personality, just as God the ­Father clearly did in the Old Testament. Christ made manifest in late medieval texts is clearly omnipresent and omniscient and often refers to his own omnipotence. Christ is marked as divine not so much by apophatic transcendence as by the divine attributes of omnipresence, omniscience, and omnipotence. One might have thought it was Christ’s humanity, that which he shared with the rest of humankind, that made him accessible to ordinary experience. No doubt it is true that the h ­ uman nature of Christ made him more like other ­humans, but that is not what makes him accessible to individuals across time.

33 6 Co n cl u si o n

Ordinary ­people can pray to Christ, assuming his presence and accessibility, ­because as God he has the quality of ubiquity. Even if he bears and discloses his ­human nature, it is not by virtue of it that he is ubiquitously accessible. ­Those who speak of actually experiencing his presence can do so—­and be believed—­primarily ­because they share with o ­ thers in their culture the conviction that he is the eternally divine and thus accessible person. But not every­one experiences him in the same way, which brings us to the second main theme of this study. Anyone may presuppose that Christ is pre­ sent, that he hears prayers, and that in some manner he responds to them. Not every­one has moments of intuition that he is responding or manifesting himself—­moments that do not lend themselves to precise definition ­because they are (and are at times explic­itly said to be) vague and indeterminate. The claim to have intuited Christ’s presence is not necessarily exceptional; anyone who feels inspired, empowered, reassured, or chastised in response to prayer could in princi­ple speak of some kind of intuition. But to say that one has actually perceived Christ is to take claim an experience more clearly exceptional. It is one ­thing to say, “I had a sense that Christ was urging me to do this,” and it is dif­fer­ent to claim, “I heard Christ telling me, ‘Do this!’ ” To claim, “I saw Christ standing before me and saying, ‘Do this!’ ” is to move even further in the direction of exceptional experience. The claim to perception can, however, be variously interpreted. Usually the voice and even the vision are said to be perceived by the inner senses, which are more difficult to distinguish from intuition than the data of external senses, and thus less manifestly exceptional. To speak of a voice heard may at times be a way of remembering or reporting an experience that is less obviously out of the ordinary. When a hagiographer means to exalt a pious person as a saint, or when a community wishes to represent its singular members as privileged, the claim to having perceived Christ as pre­sent and communicating w ­ ill tend to be more straightforwardly exceptional. This theme again is linked to ­others we have discussed. The habit of praying devotionally to Christ, distinct from the liturgical custom of praying primarily to the ­Father, and the proliferation of meditations focused on the life of Christ clearly underlie the tendency to expect and report Christophany. Scripted dialogues meant as meditative exercises represent one outgrowth of the tradition of praying to Christ and meditating on him and his life, although ­these scripted texts tend to be l­ater than most of our sources. Scripted texts of this sort may to some extent have been inspirations for spontaneous Christophany and dialogue with Christ, but it is more likely that they ­were modeled a­ fter e­ arlier accounts in hagiography. Prob­ably more impor­tant as a way of cultivating the expectation of Christophany are the s­ imple but potentially hypnogogic interjections cultivated by several late medieval Christians, some-



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times as s­imple as the repeated invocation of Christ’s name “Jesus.” ­Later medieval Christocentric religion underlay not only modes of prayer that could lead into Christophany but also the network of cultural forms—­symbols, meta­phors, and allegories—­within which the inculturation of Christ could occur. The habit of speaking of Christ as lover, as teacher, as having a heart that one could enter, all provided a cultural world that Christ could enter into, somewhat as he once entered into the ­human situation historically. The habit of praying to Christ is presupposed also by ­those dramatic situations in which Christ intervenes in social dynamics: he does so typically in response to the prayer that entails an openness to response and manifestation. The Christology assumed by Christophany was not specific to the l­ ater medieval setting, but to some extent the modes of prayer and meditation that led to the expectation of contact with Christ ­were products of the time. If the period from the late thirteenth to the early fifteenth ­century witnessed a flourishing of this phenomenon, especially in the w ­ omen’s monasteries but to some extent outside them, that development can be seen as a component of the broader devotional culture of the era. The devotionalism did not go away, but the fifteenth c­ entury brought a more skeptical countertrend that seems to have dampened the enthusiasm for reports of Christophany. All of the subthemes h ­ ere discussed—­prayer and meditation, the world of symbolic forms, the intercession that brings prayer and thus Christophany into connection with social networks—­are the stuff of which ordinary late medieval religion is composed. But they are also the context within which claims of exceptional experience occurred and the context within which such claims could be accepted as making sense, sometimes as marks of sanctity. Ultimately Christ could be pre­sent to the few only ­because he was pre­sent to all. His exceptional manifestation is grounded in his unexceptional presence. His mystical presence, which might be a special privilege, presupposed his spiritual presence, which was seen as in ­every sense universal. That basic point, that interplay between the ordinary and the exceptional, was a theme that Julian of Norwich embraced as central to Christian piety. Having seen Christ vividly as she lay in critical illness, she “saw him and sought him,” pre­sent though not always manifest, and even if her visionary experience was exceptional, still to her mind the experience of having yet wanting him, recognizing yet ever desiring his presence, should be “our common working” in this life.1 1. ​Julian of Norwich, Showings, trans. Edmund Colledge and James Walsh, Long Test, c. 10 (New York: Paulist, 1978), 193. The passage is discussed in Nancy Bradley Warren, The Embodied Word: Female Spiritualities, Contested Orthodoxies, and En­glish Religious Cultures, 1350–1700 (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010), 39–40.

S e l ec te d B i b l i o g r a p h y

Sources given in the list of abbreviations are not listed h ­ ere, nor are studies of only peripheral relevance to the themes of this book. Primary Sources

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Index

absence, prob­lem of, 328–32 Adelhausen sister-­book, 69–70, 170 child Christ, 185 communal ethos, 270 death, 251 ordinary events, 266 Passion, 187 shared communal interest, 259–62 Virgin and Child, 177–78 admiranda and imitanda, 15–16 Aelred of Rievaulx, 212 afterlife, 252. See also heaven; purgatory Albert the ­Great, 83, 325 Angela of Foligno, 42–44, 97–98, 163, 207–8 Angelico, Fra, 162 Annunciation, 162, 194–95 Anselm of Canterbury, 21, 56, 138–39, 144 apocryphal gospels, 81–82, 162, 191 Aquinas, Thomas. See Thomas Aquinas Aristotle, 114 Augustine, 125, 218, 330 autotheology, 36, 41 child Christ, 84–86 Christina of Hane, 62–63 Gertrude of Helfta, 55–56 Hadewijch, 46 Mechthild of Hackeborn, 51–54 Bake, Alijt, 120–23 Barr, Jessica, 91n6 Barratt, Alexandra, 233 Begerin, Ursula, 149 Bernard of Claurvaux, 21, 58, 95, 184 carnal love for humanity of Christ, 44, 71, 79–80 betrothal, mystical, 264, 308–09, 312 Beutin, Wolfgang, 247–48 Biel, Gabriel, 28 Birgitta of Sweden, 80–81, 118–19, 148–49, 326 Bonaventure, 83–84, 114–15 bridegroom, Christ as, 40, 204, 209–11, 233–34, 330

Adelhausen sister-­book, 251, 272 Christina of Hane, 65–66 at death, 249–50 Dorothea of Montau, 9, 109, 157–58, 302, 304–13 Gertrude of Helfta, 58, 232–34, 236 Ide of Nivelles, 49 Mechthild of Magdeburg, 40, 228 Tucher, Katharina, 155 Bynum, Caroline Walker, 16n36, 22n4, 49n52, 145n43, 167n5, 204n4 Caesarius of Heisterbach, 181 Carthage, Council of (397), 136 and n10 Catherine of Siena, 6, 107, 116, 296–98 Chalcedon, Council of (451), 27, 30 child Christ, 37, 71, 81–86 Dorothea of Montau, 199 in exhibition, 180–81 Katharinental, 271 Margery Kempe, 75 Nativity, 184–85 sister-­books, 85–86, 185, 271 Sunder, Friedrich, 208–09 in visual art, 245 Christina of Hane, 31, 61–67, 172 Christina of Markyate, 91–92 Christophany, concept of, 13 Coakley, John, 284 communion. See Eucharist communities with dramas of interacting personalities, 266–70 conjuration of Christ, 160 and n99 Constance of Rabastens, 14, 93 critique of mystical experience, 325–28 crucifix, 242–44, 251, 258, 267, 293 cura monialium, 205 Cyril of Alexandria, 27–28 David of Augsburg, 325 death and deathbed, 246–54, 277–79, 318–20 357

35 8 INDE X

demandes d’amour, 51–52 demonic deception, 205, 216, 264, 297, 317 Kempe, Margery, 76, 111, 322 Langmann, Adelheid, 173–74 lit­er­a­ture on discernment of spirits, 325–27 Denis the Carthusian, 151 Devil, 76, 111, 250–51, 297, 326–27 devotionalism, 74–75, 113, 105–06, 136, 257–58, 336–37 Dorothea of Montau, 298–301 images, 161–63 Dinzelbacher, Peter, 155n79 discernement of spirits, 317, 326–28 divinity and humanity of Christ, 7, 21–87, 334–36 divinized humanity, 37, 64–65, 67–70, 172 Dominicans, 10, 49, 60, 68, 166, 205, 223–24, 240, 256–57, 269, 273, 279 Dorothea of Montau, 9–10, 283–321 child Christ, 84–85, 186 Christ as disciplinarian, 292–98 Christ as instructor, 313–18 death, 318–20 devotions, 298–301 discernment of spirits, 317 divinity and humanity of Christ, 73–74 double consciousness, 148 error, 317–18 exhibition, 181 extraction of heart, 307–08 heaven, 200, 309–19 heresy, 315–17 inner senses, 108–10 interjection, 157–58 introlocution, 123–24 intuition, perception, 99–100 language, 291–92 liturgy, 194–202 mystical betrothal and marriage, 308–10 mystical energy, 306–07 mystical pregnancy, 305, 310 mystical experience, 304–13 participant in biblical events, 198–99 prayers, 141 purgatory, 280–81 recollection of past, 125–26 social relations, 301–04 Duns Scotus, 94 Ebner, Christina, 82, 93 Ebner, Margaret, 145, 67–68 child Christ, 84, 245 crucifixes, 163

interjections, 158–59 intuition and perception of presence, 98–99 name of Jesus, 158–59 shared communal interest, 258–59 Eckhart, Meister, 33, 61, 66, 104, 172, 216–20 Eiximenis, Francesc, 139 Eleusinian mysteries, 179 Elizabeth of Schönau, 182 Elliott, Dyan, 315 Engelthal sister-­book child Christ, 185 deathbed, 277–79 dramas of interacting personalities, 266–69 ordinary events, 266 Passion, 186–87 resurrection, 187–88 shared communal interest, 258–59 Virgin and child, 176 Vorhtlin, Anna, 1 Ephesus, Council of (431), 27–28 Ephraim the Syrian, 137 Epiphany, 196–97 Erasmus, Desiderius, 93 eroticism, theoeroticism, 207–09, 233–34, 285 Eternal Wisdom, Christ as, 220–23 eternity, 36–37 and n3, 40, 135, 167–68 and n7, 174, 184, 193, 217, 282 Eucharist, communion, 2, 4, 23, 167, 181, 202, 212 Angela of Foligno, 97 Catherine of Siena, 297 Christina of Hane, 64–65, 68 Dorothea of Montau, 124, 157–58, 196, 201, 286–87, 299–300, 307, 309–10, 312, 315, 319 Ebner, Margaret, 67, 98 Eckhart, Meister, 104, 173 Gertrude of Helfta, 172, 248, 265, 277 Langmann, Adelheit, 173 Mechthild of Hackeborn, 52–54, 175, 263–64, 274 Mechthild of Magdeburg, 41 Negroni, Veronica, of Binasco, 189 Rickeldey, Gertrude, 295 sister-­books, 69, 73, 170, 176, 178, 185, 244, 251, 268–70 Sunder, Friedrich, 208 Evangelical Protestantism, 101–03 exhibition, 179–81 Fanefjord, Denmark, 134–35 Ferrer, Vincent, 143 Finet, Nicholas, 151–52, 187

INDE X 359 Finnegan, Mary Jeremy, 8 first-­person voice, 11 Flora of Beaulieu, 145 Folini, Christian, 227 Francis of Assisi, 134 gender, 12–13, 203–11, 320–21 Gerson, Jean, 295, 326 Gertrude of Helfta, 25, 54–59, 104 community as subject of revelation, 264–65 death, 252–54 images, 161 inculturation, 226 intercession, 275–77 intuition and perception of presence, 96, 98 liturgical year, 183–84 liturgy, 171–72 meditation, 145 modes of manifestation, 232–38 power of suggestion, 323–25 prayers, 141 sickness and death, 248–50 Virgin and child, 175 visual art, 242 ghosts, 110 and n83 Gibran, Kahlil, 35 Gotteszell sister-­book, 86, 176–77, 260 Gregory, Rabia, 15, 210 Gregory of Nazianzen, 137 Grundmann, Herbert, 115n101 Guardini, Romano, 83 Hadewijch of Brabant, 46–49 hair, 83, 86 Hamburger, Jeffrey, 12, 240 Harrison, Anna, 10, 148, 202, 227, 263, 279 heart, extraction of, 307–08 heart of Christ, 122, 154, 171, 208, 237–39 Christina of Hane, 61, 65 Gertrude of Helfta, 56–57, 59, 134, 238, 250, 252, 265 Mechthild of Hackerborn, 53, 183, 248, 258, 263, 237–39, 330 Mechthild of Magdeburg, 40, 237–38 heaven, 193–94, 196 Christina of Hane, 63 Dorothea of Montau, 200, 309–19 Gertrude of Helfta, 252–53, 264 Kempe, Margery, 331 Mechthild of Hackeborn, 231–32, 263 sister-­books, 70–73, 172, 244, 266 Heinrich of Langenstein, 326

Helfta, 38–42, 49–61 modes of manifestation, 231–39 purgatory, 279 sickness and death, 247–50, 252–54 social dynamics, 255–56. See also Gertrude of Helfta; Mechthild of Hackeborn; Mechthild of Magdeburg Henry of Friemar, 327–28 heresy charge, 216, 286, 315–18 Hesychasm, 306 Hilton, Walter, 104–5, 213–16 Hollywood, Amy, 115n101 Huizinga, Johan, 191 Ida of Nivelles, 6–7, 48–49, 94 idolatry, 163–64 Ignatius of Loyola, 227 imagination, 98, 101, 103, 110–11, 145–46, 241, 337, 258 Bonaventure, 114–15 Helfta, nuns of, 226 imaginary friends, 102–03 Kempe, Margery, 111 philosophical conception, 113–15 realized imagination, 113, 161 inculturation, concept of, 225–26 indulgences, 274, 299 inner senses, 106–13, 121, 185–86, 259, 287, 326 intercession, 272–77 interjections, 156–60 intratextual transitions, 127–28 introlocution, 123 intuition of presence, 8, 89–101, 336 Jesus Collations, 155–56 Jews, 147, 156, 190, 243, 273 Joan of Arc, 100 Johannes de Caulibus. See Pseudo-­Bonaventure John, gospel of, 25, 31, 52, 62, 99, 147, 173, 246 John of Damascus, 28, 30, 68 Jones, Claire Taylor, 166, 270 Jubilee, Roman, 300 Julian of Norwich, 231–32, 251, 337 Karnes, Michelle, 114 Katharinental sister-­book, 71, 170–71 child Christ, 185 communal ethos, 270–72 liturgical space, 178 ordinary events, 266 visual art, 241–44

36 0 INDE X

Kazantzakis, Nikos, 35 Kempe, Margery, 21–23, 75–80 death, 250–51 exhibition, 180 ­father, relationship with, 78n166 heaven, 331 heresy charge, 315–16 inner senses, 111–13 meditation, 147–48 participant in biblical events, 198 prob­lem of absence, 331 reassurance, 117–20 recollection of past, 125 specific instruction, 296 ubiquity of Christ, 92 Kieckhefer, Richard, Unquiet Souls, 15, 16n35, 22n4, 145n43 Kirakosian, Racha, 50–51, 62 Kirchberg sister-­book, 69 knowledge of Christ, 83–84 Krug, Rebecca, 117 Lachance, Paul, 5 and n13 Lamprecht of Regensburg, 325 Langman, Adelheid, 66, 292–93 child Christ, 185–86 liturgy, 168–69 purgatory, 280 Virgin and Child, 173 Last Judgment, 137, 181, 248 Leo I (pope), 27n16 Lewis, C.S., 191–92 Lewis, Gertrude Jaron, 12 liturgy, 8–9, 166–202 liturgical space, 178 liturgical year, 182–93 Love, Nicholas, 142 Ludolph of Saxony, 143–44, 330 Luhrmann, Tanya, 101–05 Lukardis of Oberweimar, 163, 246, 265 Luke, gospel of, 31, 45, 195 Lutgard of Aywières, 6, 100 magic, 24, 160n99 magisterial discourse, 36, 50–51, 55, 81, 83–86 Malinski, Mieczyslaw, 35 Man of Sorrows, 32, 37, 40, 74, 134–35, 162, 180–81, 227, 335 Margaret of Cortona, 44–46, 107, 138, 329 Margaret of York, 151–52, 187 Marie d’Oignies, 227 Marienwerder, Johannes, 73, 280–81, 283–92

marriage, mystical, 308–10 Mary. See Virgin Mary Mass of Saint Gregory, 167, 171, 181 Matthew, gospel of, 4, 248 McGinn, Bernard, 15 McNamer, Sarah, 204 Mechthild of Hackeborn, 49–54 child Christ, 84, 186 community as subject of revelation, 263–64 devotionalism, 257–58 intercession, 273–75 interjections, 156–57 intuition of presence, 96 liturgical year, 182–83 liturgy, 171 modes of manifestation, 228, 231–32, 237–38 power of suggestion, 323 prob­lem of absence, 330–31 shared communal interest, 259 ubiquity of Christ, 92 Virgin and Child, 175 Mechthild of Magdeburg, 38–42 child Christ, 84 community as subject of revelation, 262–63 dialogues, 152 estrangement, 331–32 intercession, 272–73 modes of manifestation, 228–31, 237 participant in biblical events, 198 prayers, 140 meditation, meditations on the life of Christ, 23–24, 56, 141–49, 198–99 merit, transfer of, 237, 249, 252, 254, 265, 274–77 Merswin, Rulman, 117 Methley, Richard, 159 Meyer, Johannes, 127 Miaphysitism, 68 Moeller, Bernd, 298 Mossman, Stephen, 288, 300, 315 Muffel, Katharina, 31–32 mutually willed inattention to difference, 269–70 mystical and devotional language, fusion of, 37, 52, 54, 65–67, 70–71 mystical marriage, 78 mystical presence, concept of, 3, 6, 13 name of Jesus, 98, 158–60, 183, 213 Nativity, 196

INDE X 361 Negroni, Veronica, of Binasco, 188–93 divinity and humanity of Christ, 25 Nestorius, 27 Newman, Barbara, 78n166, 101–02, 144n43, 155n81, 261n18 Nider, Johannes, 143 obedience, 92, 262–63, 270–71, 277, 329 Dorothea of Montau, 286–87, 289, 300, 302 Oetenbach sister-­book, 69 Oguro, Shunji, 155 Ong, Walter, 105 Origen, 107, 136 Orsi, Robert A., 106n64, 329n20 Passion of Christ, 22–23, 30–33 Bake, Alijt, 120–22 Christina of Hane, 65–66 Dorothea of Montau, 181, 197–98 Ebner, Margaret, 67 images, 161–62 Kempe, Margery, 78–79, 147, 250 liturgy, 180–81, 186–87 Mechthild of Magdeburg, 40 meditations, 142, 146–49, 151, 171 Negroni, Veronica, of Binasco, 190 prayers, 138 sister-­books, 186–87, 241, 259, 262 Paul, epistles of, 4 Pelagius of Majorca, 160n99 penitence, 137–38 perception of presence, 8, 89–90, 96–101, 336 person and personality, 211–23 Peter Lombard, 28 Peters, Ursula, 155n79 Pietà, 74, 162, 243 pilgrimage, 89, 213, 257–58 Dorothea of Montau, 285, 300 Margery Kempe, 79, 118, 147 play, playfulness, 109, 144, 161, 186, 221, 229, 245, 332, 335 divine playfulness, 82–83 Dorothea of Montau, 199 Sunder, Friedrich, 208 sister-­books, 176, 185, 271–72, 278 Prague, 206, 286, 300, 314–15 prayer, 8, 88, 93 and n18, 133–65, 140–41, 272 and n63, 330, 333, 336–37 Angela of Foligno, 163–64 Bake, Alijt, 121 Catherine of Siena, 297

dogmatic, 136–37 Dorothea of Montau, 125, 141, 157–58, 195, 280–81, 289–90, 299–300, 302, 307 Ebner, Christina, 93 Ebner, Margaret, 68, 158–59 Evangelical, 101, 103–04 Gertrude of Helfta, 55, 61, 141, 161, 236–37, 252–53, 264, 275–76 Hilton, Walter, 213 lament for absence, 138–39 Ludolph of Saxony, 143–44 Mechthild of Hackeborn, 258, 273 Mechthild of Magdeburg, 39, 84 Methley, Richard, 159 Negroni, Veronica, of Binasco, 189 penitential, 137–38 Rickeldey, Gertrude, 295 sister-­books, 85, 184–85, 241, 243–45, 261, 265, 269–70 Suso, Henry, 90 pregnancy, mystical, 158, 305, 310 preparation for liturgy and communion, 200–202, 264–65, 299 presupposition of presence, 8, 89–96 problematics of presence, 10, 322–33 projection from the biblical past, 37, 63, 168–69, 182, 188, 241–42 Pseudo-­Bonaventure, Meditations on the Life of Christ, 23–24, 31, 142, 144–46 psychological transitions, 126–27 puer senex, 84, 191 purgatory, 117n105, 154, 251, 252, 279–81 Christina of Hane, 63 and n108 Dorothea of Montau, 280–81, 289, 303 Helfta, 253, 257, 276 Kempe, Margery, 118, 120, 251 Quinzani, Stefana, 187 Raymond of Capua, 296–97 reassurance, 77, 115–24 redactional transitions, 127 resurrection, 187–88 retrojection to the biblical past, 37, 63, 144–49, 168, 182, 188, 192–94 Richard of Saint-­Victor–­Trinity, 177, 304 Rickeldey, Gertrude, 146 inner senses, 107 intuition, 95–96 prob­lem of absence, 331 reassurance, 116 specific instruction, 295–96 ubiquity of Christ, 93

36 2 INDE X

Rilke, Rainer Maria, 261 Rolle, Richard, 112, 139, 159–60 Ross, Ellen, 33 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 116 Schwester Katrei, 325–26 scripted dialogues, 149–53, 336 scrupulosity, 295 Sered, Susan Starr, 203–04 sister-­books, 9, 68–73, 127 child Christ, 85–86, 185, 271 liturgical year, 184–88 liturgy, 170–72 Passion, 186–87 social dynamics, 256–57 Virgin and Child, 175–79 visual art, 239–46. See also Adelhausen; Engelthal; Gotteszell; Katharinental; Kirchberg; Oetenbach; Töss; Unterlinden Song of Songs, 308, 330 Southern, R.W., 21–22 suggestion, power of, 323–24 Sunder, Friedrich, 92, 116, 168–70, 208–09, 280 Suso, Henry, 61, 90, 117, 220–23 Tauler, Johannes, 219–20 Teresa of Ávila, 95, 164 Thomas à Kempis, 150–51 Thomas Aquinas, 30, 68, 151 Thomas of Cantimpré, 100 Thomas the Apostle, 25, 325 Three Kings (magi), 196–97 Töss sister-­book, 69, 72–73, 85–86, 173 communal ethos, 272 liturgical space, 178 shared communal interest, 259–60 visual art, 244 transtemporality, 36–37, 59, 217–18, 282, 335 Angela of Foligno, 46 child Christ, 81 Christina of Hane, 63–64 Eckhart, Meister, 218–19 Kempe, Margery, 75, 77, 79 liturgy, 167, 174, 179, 186

Mechthild of Magdeburg, 40 Negroni, Veronica, of Binasco, 193 sister-­books, 71–72. See also projection from the biblical past; retrojection to the biblical past Trinity, 45, 76, 85, 233 Angela of Foligno, 42–43 Mechthild of Magdeburg, 40–41 Mechthild of Hackeborn, 51 Tucher, Katharina, 153–55 Unterlinden sister-­book, 69–71, 86, 145–46, 171 child Christ, 184–85, 245 community as subject of revelation, 265 deathbed, 277 dramas of interacting personalities, 269–70 shared communal interest, 259–61 visual art, 241 Ursulina of Parma, 14 Vernet, Felix, 88–89 Veronica, Saint, 162, 257–58 Veronica of Binasco. See Negroni, Veronica, of Binasco Vidal, Jaime, 23–24 Virgin and Child, 161, 175, 220, 243, 245–46 Dorothea of Montau, 197, 199 liturgy, 173–79 sister-­books, 71, 175–77, 241, 278 Virgin Mary, 43, 147, 162, 190, 192–94, 280, 316 dormition, 247, 250 Dorothea of Montau, 85, 141, 159, 194–96, 288, 303, 307, 310, 316, 318–20 Helfta, 59–60, 183, 264 sister-­books, 259–61, 265, 278 Voaden, Rosalynn, 255 Weiler sister-­book, 175 Whiterig, John, 146–47 William of Ockham, 28, 94 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 228 ­women’s religion, 12–13 won­der, 51