The Permeable Self: Five Medieval Relationships 9780812299939

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The Permeable Self

THE MIDDLE AGES SERIES

Ruth Mazo Karras, Series Editor Edward Peters, Founding Editor A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.

THE PERMEABLE SELF Five Medieval Relationships

Barbara Newman

Un iver sit y of Pen nsy lvan i a Press Phil adelphi a

Copyright © 2021 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112 www.upenn.edu/pennpress Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN 978-0-8122-5334-4

Totus tecum sum, et ut verius dicam, totus in te sum. Peter Abelard (?), Epistolae duorum amantium, no. 16

Contents

List of Illustrations

Introduction. Members of One Another

ix

1

Chapter 1. Teacher and Student: Shaping Boys

15

Chapter 2. Saint and Sinner: Reading Minds

59

Chapter 3. Lovers: Exchanging Hearts

107

Chapter 4. Mother and Child: Giving Birth

156

Chapter 5. God and the Devil: Possessing Souls

209

Conclusion, or Why It Still Matters

263

Notes

287

Bibliography

335

Index

361

Acknowledgments

371

I l l u s t r at i o n s

Figure 1 Figure 2 Figure 3 Figure 4 Figure 5 Figure 6 Figure 7 Figure 8

Dwarfs on the shoulders of giants, encyclopedic manuscript The abduction of Ganymede, capital from Vézelay An angel takes St. Catherine of Siena’s heart, illuminated Life Christ gives his heart to St. Catherine, illuminated Life St. Catherine offers her heart to Christ, painting by Guidoccio Cozzarelli The Visitation, sculpture from Katharinental The Visitation, painting by Rogier van der Weyden The Temptation of St. Anthony, ascribed to Hieronymus Bosch

Table 1

Thirteenth-Century Lives: The Database

25 50 146 147 148 179 180 215 65

Introduction

Members of One Another

We are members of one another. —St. Paul (Romans 12:5)

What does it mean to be a person, a human self? In everyday speech, we use the term more or less synonymously with “individual” to mean any human being. But in legal and philosophical debates, the problematic nature of personhood quickly emerges. Should it be assigned on the basis of such criteria as selfawareness, agency, rationality, and the ability to care for oneself? Then unborn babies would be excluded, but so would newborns and those suffering from severe psychosis, mental retardation, or late-stage dementia. Conversely, many nonhuman animals would be included. In American law, corporations and labor unions are treated as persons, yet dolphins and chimpanzees are not. Should a robot with advanced artificial intelligence count as a person? No one knows, but Steven Spielberg poignantly raised the question in his 2001 film A.I. While this book does not directly address such contemporary issues, I hope it will shed an oblique light on them. It approaches the meaning of personhood historically by way of some fascinating liminal phenomena in medieval poetry, hagiography, and other discourses. These phenomena concern not individuals in their solitude but interpersonal relations at a certain pitch of intensity, where the boundaries between persons seem to blur. Some of them are little known, others familiar but little studied. All raise tantalizing questions about the nature of persons in relationship. Why, for example, did the myth of the separable heart take such a firm hold in romance literature, from lovers who exchange hearts on parting to mystics who exchange hearts with Jesus? Why did Augustine represent his pedagogical ideal as a mutual indwelling of teacher and student? What

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special traits gave both saints and demoniacs their ability to read minds? Why were mothers who died in childbirth buried in unconsecrated ground? All these phenomena, diverse as they are, exemplify a kind of selfhood more permeable than we are used to imagining. In A Secular Age, Charles Taylor observes that the premodern self was more “porous” than the bounded or “buffered” self that has replaced it. In modernity, he writes, “the only locus of thoughts, feelings, spiritual élan is what we call minds; the only minds in the cosmos are those of humans . . . ; and minds are bounded, so that these thoughts, feelings, etc., are situated ‘within’ them.” But in “the world of spirits, demons, [and] moral forces which our predecessors acknowledged,” it was not so.1 Not only was the boundary between mind and world more porous, but meanings already inhered in spiritual agents independently of human beings, rather than being attributed by our minds. “Charged” entities—whether the Holy Spirit, demons, saintly relics, or a hundred kinds of blessed and cursed objects—could draw humans into their force fields and exert an objective power, both physical and spiritual. When this happened, their meaning and power entered a liminal space, neither purely internal nor external to us—rather, “a kind of interspace which straddles what for us is a clear boundary.”2 This book is about that interspace. It does look at demons and spirits, that is, at the relations of human beings with supernatural ones, seen from the standpoint of enhanced or threatened personhood. But its primary focus is on human relations themselves, for the porous selfhood that Taylor describes also shaped the ways people perceived and related to one another. My project is to discover exactly what that unfamiliar kind of personhood meant for medieval Europeans, not just as a contrast or prequel to modernity, but as a way of being in the world. If Taylor is right, as I believe he is, how did their greater permeability—a freer openness to spiritual and communal influences, a less bounded psyche, even a lack of what we now call “healthy ego boundaries”—affect the kinds of relationships people formed, and the ways they experienced and behaved in them? What advantages, and what problems, did such a porous selfhood entail? To answer such questions, The Permeable Self examines five peculiarly intimate medieval relationships: those between teacher and student, saint and sinner, lovers, mother and child, and God and the devil. The angle from which I approach these relationships, as well as the meaning of personhood itself, is coinherence, a theological idea that I will unpack in the rest of this Introduction. Persona itself, as a medieval concept, also requires some explanation. The person is not the only or even the most obvious concept to use in exploring human selfhood. Recent historians have more often addressed the self with

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reference to either “the individual” (vis-à-vis the collective) or “the subject” (vis-àvis institutional power). As psychological concepts, both are decidedly modern. “Individual” in the sense of “a distinct personality” emerged only in the nineteenth century, long after its older sense had become obsolete.3 The currently fashionable “subject” has political, grammatical, and psychological senses, of which the first two are ancient but the last, recent. Derived from subiectum, the past participle of subicio, the “subject” already had conflicting senses in medieval Latin. To be a political subject is to be subordinate and governed by authority, as wife by husband or vassal by lord. To be a grammatical subject, on the other hand, is to possess agency and govern a verb—an ambiguity with which medieval grammarians like Alan of Lille had wicked fun.4 Postmodern usage, following Louis Althusser, echoes that ambiguity by rather tendentiously linking political subjection to subjectivity, seen as the psychological realm of self-consciousness and desire.5

Persons in and as Relations As Timothy Reiss observes, “individual” and “subject” are ideologically charged terms, both so thoroughly bound up with post-Enlightenment concepts as to be of limited use in exploring the premodern self.6 Persona, on the other hand, is a capacious medieval term and thus more useful for recapturing the complex meanings of personhood in that era. The term intriguingly combines the most external with the most intimate forms of identity, deriving its double sense from its dual origins in classical theatre on the one hand, doctrinal controversy on the other.7 On the ancient Roman stage, a persona was an actor’s mask, hence a character in the drama. Shakespeare’s plays still have lists of dramatis personae. From that usage derive the many public, performative senses of persona in medieval Latin: an official or dignitary, a legal proxy, a personification, a beneficed cleric or “parson,” a corporate body acting as a moral person.8 In another realm entirely, the theological controversies of the patristic age gave the word a new sense derived from the same root meaning, “face.” Used rather loosely to translate the Greek hypostasis, a subsistent being, persona came to denote a center of consciousness, or what we might call a “self,” over against a “nature,” an abstract set of properties characterizing a particular type of being. Latin theologians formulated the central paradoxes of Christian doctrine through the interplay of these terms. Over centuries of acrimonious debate, they came to define the Trinity as three persons (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) sharing one divine nature, and Christ as a single person possessing two natures, divine and human.9

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Boethius, a sixth-century heir to those debates, bequeathed a famous definition to the Middle Ages: persona vero rationabilis naturae individua substan­ tia.10 This apparently simple formula is more complex than it looks; even its translation is vexed. “A person is an indivisible substance”—or as we would now say, a subsistent individual—“possessed of a rational nature.” Three points stand out. First, a person is a subject (“substance,” or existent being) who possesses a specific nature. Second, no person can be divided, for that is what individua means. And third, a person’s nature is rational, thus including God, angels, and human beings but not (at least in medieval thought) animals. Thomas Aquinas began with this Boethian definition when he set out to discuss the three persons of the Trinity. Remarkably, however, he ended by defining the divine persons as “subsistent relations.” This counterintuitive idea is worth expounding, as it is central to the model of personhood explored here. The persons of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, individually and together, all possess the rational nature of the Godhead. Yet, because there is only one God and not three, they possess exactly the same nature with the same consciousness—a single mind, a single love. There can be no question of three divine “personalities” like Zeus, Apollo, and Athena. The persons are distinguished, then, only by their relations to one another. Scripture uses two biological processes, begetting and breathing, as metaphors for the inner divine life. Thus the Father is seen as the one who begets the Son, the Son as the Only-Begotten of the Father, and the Spirit as the one “breathed forth” by both. These relations of fatherhood, sonship, and “spiration” are the sole distinguishing features of the three persons. Thus Thomas concludes that a divine person is a subsistent relation—a relationship that exists “not as an accident in a subject, but [as] the divine essence itself.”11 Like all divine predicates, personhood-as-relation cannot be predicated univocally of God and creatures, but neither is it equivocal. Rather, the idea must be construed analogically. However the analogy may work (and Thomas does not spell it out), a person can only be understood as, or at least in, relation to other persons. Once the essential dogmas concerning Christ and the Trinity were in place, both could be extended to define human selfhood. Christian anthropology is founded on the doctrine of imago Dei, the human person created in the image of God. While the image is most often defined as rationality or free will, it also has some less familiar implications. For example, the divine Self was conceived as supremely permeable. The three persons of the Trinity not only share the same nature; they are also said to “indwell” one another reciprocally. This is the doctrine known in English as coinherence, or being-within-one-another. The technical terms are the Greek perichoresis, “giving way to each other” or “circling

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round one another,” and its Latin equivalent, circumincessio. These terms gained traction in the late patristic period, with the Byzantine theologians Maximus the Confessor (d. 662) and John of Damascus (d. 749).12 Perichoresis entered Western theology through a translation of John of Damascus’s treatise On the Orthodox Faith in the twelfth century. From that point on, scholastic theologians such as Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, and Bonaventure used it to think about the persons of the Trinity.13 They did not directly employ it to analyze the human person, but as this book shows, the ontology and practice of coinherence are subtly persistent, even pervasive, in medieval thought. If the term is not biblical, the concept is decidedly so. It is one of the few doctrines equally central to Paul and John—two New Testament theologians who other wise have little in common. Jesus in the Fourth Gospel declares, “I am in the Father and the Father in me” (John 14:11). And again, “You will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you” (John 14:20). As a gospel theory of selfhood, coinherence asserts the porousness of human persons on the model of the divine. “The glory which you have given me I have given to them,” Christ tells the Father, “that they may be one even as we are one, I in them and you in me” (John 17:22–23). Throughout the New Testament, but especially in John’s Gospel, the preposition in bears heavy metaphysical weight. Paul offers a version of the same idea. Where John asserts that believers “abide in” the Son as the Son abides in the Father, Paul ascribes a mystical solidarity to the entire human race: “As in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive” (1 Cor. 15:22). Often misunderstood, this claim indicates more than a moral opposition. All have fallen in Adam, Paul implies, because “Adam” is for him humanity itself, created in and for coinherence. He is, so to speak, the first subsistent person who possesses the entire rational nature of humankind. It is not just that all have imitated Adam’s sin, or even (as Augustine maintained) that all inherit it through biological descent. Rather, all mortals have sinned in Adam, being ontologically present in the first man just as they are in the second Adam, Christ. This Pauline interpretation of Adam unites a historical person with the universal or Platonic form of humanity, which is why his sin looms so much larger in the New Testament than it does in the Hebrew Bible. Each individual dwells in the universal Man, who is both Adam and Christ, and reciprocally, the universal dwells in each individual.14 Because all Christians are members of the same mystical body (1 Cor. 12:12–27), they are equally “members of one another” (Rom. 12:5, Eph. 4:25). The metaphor is a strong one, which the apostle elaborates by naming specific parts of the body: Barnabas may be Phoebe’s eye, while Priscilla is Timothy’s ear.

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On this model, the essence of personhood is the capacity to be permeated by other selves, other persons, without being fractured by them. A “person” in this sense has little to do with either the self-sufficient, much-maligned Enlightenment self or the decentered, fragmented postmodern self. Rather, the personal is, by definition, the interpersonal. One cannot be a person by oneself, only with, through, and in other persons. Like so many Christian doctrines, the notion of coinherence is beautifully expressed by that most religious of atheists, Ludwig Feuerbach. In his early work Thoughts on Death and Immortality (1830), Feuerbach vividly captured the idea of the permeable self, the person who can live only through participation in others: “Every single human being who exists outside of me is a hole, an emptiness, a gap in me. I am an entirely perforated essence. My whole being is a pore. Every essence like mine that exists independently punctures me, wounds me. . . . Other human beings are nothing other than the objective, independent pores of my own self as observed outside of me. And so all things are porous, full of void, open spaces.”15 Feuerbach’s thought stresses the receptiveness or negative capability, the openness to wounding, that is required for the practice of coinherence as an act of positive interpersonal exchange. For if this reciprocal indwelling is an ontological fact, it is also an ethical demand, calling for a kind of love that transcends what we normally perceive as the boundaries of the ego. Among theologians, coinherence as theory and practice has been most urgently stressed by Charles Williams, an Anglican poet, novelist, and spiritual writer of the early twentieth century. For Williams, coinherence was not only a theological principle underlying such doctrines as the Trinity, the Incarnation, and the divine motherhood of Mary but also the basis of a spiritual discipline or prayer practice, which he called “substituted love.”16 He based that discipline on the biblical injunction to “bear one another’s burdens” (Gal. 6:2), which he took to mean that one person could substantially relieve the fear, pain, or sorrow of others by intentionally bearing it in their stead. Medieval Christians exemplified the practice when they did proxy penance for another or offered suffrages, such as fasts and pilgrimages, on behalf of the dead. To promote the discipline of substituted love, Williams founded a lay religious order, the Companions of the Co-inherence, in 1939.17 “The principle is one of the open secrets of the saints,” he wrote. “We might draw the smallest step nearer sanctity if we used it. Substitutions in love, exchanges in love, are a part of it; ‘oneself ’ and ‘others’ are only the specialized terms of its technique. The technique needs much discovery; the Order would have no easy labour.”18 Other theologies of coinherence, or perichoresis, have been developed more recently in the Orthodox, Reformed, and Roman Catholic traditions.19

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Interestingly, coinherence finds particular resonance with contemporary African thought. The indigenous concept of ubuntu was promoted by the South African luminaries Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu as a basis for postapartheid development, especially the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.20 Ubuntu is an exact semantic equivalent of the English “humanity,” with further connotations of humaneness, kindness, community, hospitality, and interconnection. Citing a Zulu proverb, “a person is a person through other people,” Michael Onyebuchi Eze defines ubuntu this way: “A person is a person through other people” strikes an affirmation of one’s humanity through recognition of an “other” in his or her uniqueness and difference. It is a demand for a creative intersubjective formation in which the “other” becomes a mirror (but only a mirror) for my subjectivity. This idealism suggests to us that humanity is not embedded in my person solely as an individual; my humanity is co-substantively bestowed upon the other and me. Humanity is a quality we owe to each other. We create each other and . . . if we belong to each other, we participate in our creations: we are because you are, and since you are, definitely I am. The “I am” is not a rigid subject, but a dynamic self-constitution dependent on this otherness creation of relation and distance.21 In ubuntu, then, the Cartesian principle “I think, therefore I am” is replaced by a principle of correlative existence: “we are, therefore I am.”22 This is precisely the meaning of coinherence: “We create each other and . . . if we belong to each other, we participate in our creations.” Similarly, John Mbiti of Kenya writes: “Whatever happens to the individual happens to the whole group, and whatever happens to the whole group happens to the individual. The individual can only say: ‘I am, because we are; and since we are, therefore I am.’ This is a cardinal point in the understanding of the African view of man.”23 According to Gabriel Setiloane, personhood or humanness is attainable only in community, which is not something people decide to create as a matter of choice. Being prior to individuality, “it is given in an unaccountable way, like humanness itself and Divinity.”24 Coinherence is not exactly a household word, but I have given it pride of place in this book because it names a concept that no other English term describes—precisely the one I mean to investigate. Once introduced, the concept is not hard to grasp, for it identifies an elusive but essential aspect of what it means to be a person-in-relation. If the concept feels premodern, that is only

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because it presupposes Taylor’s porous self, sidestepping what is now widely seen as an overemphasis on the autonomous individual in Western modernity. But many other cultures hold similar views about the mutual indwelling and interconnectedness of persons, as summed up in the African proverb “we are, therefore I am.” I glance at a few more of these in the Conclusion. But each chapter of The Permeable Self offers a case study of what coinherence meant in the period I know best, the European Middle Ages. It may be for want of an adequate lexicon that scholars have failed to notice this phenomenon, so ubiquitous, yet difficult to name because its forms are so multiple. Coinherence tends to emerge most clearly in liminal spaces, providing a counterweight to the more familiar account of personhood as rational autonomy. Thus I find it especially useful for discussing interpersonal exchange at the boundaries of identity. The permeable self appears most often at the liminal junctures and imagined end points of personal history: in representations of erotic love; in the highly charged relationships between teacher and student or confessor and penitent; in the life-giving yet often death-dealing act of childbirth; in depictions of mystical union and demonic possession. Such liminal cases offer touchstones to see how medieval thinkers defined the permeable boundary between persons. Closely related is the boundary between soul and body, or as we might now say, between consciousness and performance—the inward, reflective dimension of the self and its outward, theatrical aspect. All these boundary crossings are at stake in the chapters that follow. I have arranged the five relationships that I explore in an order of increasing intimacy—moving from the outside in, so to speak—though there is also a rough chronological progression from the first chapter to the last. I begin with the phenomenon of charismatic teaching, which dates back to antiquity but flourished especially in the eleventh and early twelfth centuries. Medieval teachers and their students were separate persons who nevertheless remained connected for life, bound by an emotional bond deeper than our contemporary pedagogy likes to admit. From this relationship I proceed to examine two metaphors of even more profound coinherence—reading minds in confession or pastoral counseling, and exchanging hearts in romantic love. The notion that even our unspoken thoughts may be transparent to others, like the idea that my own heart can dwell in another’s body, may seem either meaningless or profoundly threatening to the bounded self of modernity. Yet, for the medieval writers who employ these concepts, they represent expressions of love. We may be inclined to take such notions as merely figures of speech, yet both metaphors exert an insistent pressure toward the literal, crossing the boundary into actual religious

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practice. Chapter 4 goes beyond metaphor to look at a case of literal, physical indwelling—the coinherence that is pregnancy—as medieval people portrayed it in medical writings, household books, folklore, liturgy, and mystical theology. In this case, what begins as the most bodily of all human relationships crosses the line in the opposite direction, opening onto a highly metaphorical discourse. Finally, Chapter 5 turns to the alarming case of demonic possession. In that puzzling yet prevalent phenomenon of the late Middle Ages, communion becomes invasion: an indwelling Other takes full control of the subject’s body. Yet, as I will show, the experience of the possessed is deeply shaped both for good and (more often) for ill by the human relationships that develop around it. The Permeable Self continues the analysis of interactions between the sacred and the secular that I began in my earlier book, Medieval Crossover.25 In Chapters 1, 3, and 4, I start with secular theory and praxis, then turn to the ways that each of these discourses—around pedagogy, romantic love, and pregnancy— came to be taken up in the religious sphere. Chapter 2 deals chiefly with saints’ Lives but ends with a reading of Dante. Only Chapter 5 remains entirely in the realm of the sacred. Nevertheless, even in our secular world, demonic possession remains an indelible topos of popular culture, especially in the genre of horror. The Exorcist is only the best-known example. Each chapter ends with a coda that suggests the continuing relevance of medieval thought to early modern or contemporary life, and the Conclusion carries these reflections further.

Summary of Chapters In medieval educational theory, learning from a teacher means far more than the acquisition of knowledge and skills. Unlike the relationship between instructor and students in our universities, the medieval bond was more like that of master and disciple in a wisdom tradition, where the student aspires to model his deepest self on the master. Chapter 1, “Teacher and Student: Shaping Boys,” probes the psychological dynamics of this pedagogy. In his work Instructing Beginners in Faith, Augustine describes teaching itself as a form of coinherence, rooted in empathy and mutual love directed toward a common goal. But even more, it is a process of imitation, as theorists of education stress throughout the period. The kind of imitative pedagogy that we now expect only with physical skills, such as music lessons or athletics, then pervaded all forms of instruction. Panegyrics of early medieval teachers, like the emotional correspondence between famous teachers and their “old boys,” show that there was no higher compliment than to call the

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student a living image of his master. Such imitation extended not only to the knowledge and moral virtues of the teacher but even to his physical comportment. Elegance and self-restraint, the marks of an aristocratic elite, could be discerned from a man’s gait, gestures, and facial expressions, all modeled by the teacher and mimicked by the student. This form of self-fashioning fostered an emphasis on the teacher’s charisma, transforming the Augustinian praxis of empathy into an erotics of instruction that could be both powerfully formative and dangerously abusive. Medieval pedagogy carried this principle even further: not only the living teacher but also the long-dead author of a living text can indwell the student’s mind. Monastic educators loved the ancient analogy of the memory as hot wax, ready to be imprinted with the seal of the text under study. The purer and softer the wax, the more easily it preserves impressions. This imprinting of the mind by the word was not a single act but a repetitive process with long-term consequences for the construction of identity. As Mary Carruthers has shown, medieval theorists understood memory as less a passive receptacle than a creative faculty, the indispensable foundation of thought.26 Living teachers might be fallible, mortal, and, at worst, abusive—but books as immortal teachers had none of these flaws. Learning from texts, therefore, could durably shape the student’s memory and leave an imprint that would last for life. Chapter 2, “Saint and Sinner: Reading Minds,” turns its focus to hagiography. In the inward turn of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, saints’ Lives begin to highlight a new type of miracle. Much like Jesus, who often read the thoughts of his interlocutors, saints come to be credited with miraculous insight into the minds of others through telepathy. They can discern unconfessed sins and hidden thoughts, as well as special graces that others in their humility have concealed. This kind of miracle is widespread but especially common in the corpus of saints’ Lives from the diocese of Liège, with its closely knit friendship networks of Cistercian monks, nuns, beguines, and recluses. In some vitae from this collection, intercessory prayer can procure a direct divine intervention into another person’s consciousness. Thus the hagiographer Goswin of Villers writes that his acquaintances would solicit prayers with the amazing request, “Send me God!”27 Prayer is indeed one of the most commonplace, yet undertheorized, instances of coinherence. Tellingly, however, sermon exempla from this milieu show that demoniacs were credited with the same ability to read consciences that saints enjoyed, and were even called upon to do so for forensic purposes such as identifying thieves. Through either divine or diabolical agency, then, one person’s mind could lie open to the gaze of another. Mind reading was a double-edged tool that could be used either for pastoral care and comfort or for intimidation and control. But this

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theme is hardly restricted to exempla or the Lives of obscure saints. The mind reading of the blessed was adumbrated as early as Augustine and Gregory the Great, and Thomas Aquinas asserts it too. What they proclaimed as doctrine, Dante richly imagined as poetry. As a figure for ideal coinherence, telepathy holds a prominent place in his Commedia. Even in hell the poet’s guide, Virgil, who is not saved, is able to read his mind. In Paradise, Beatrice and all the blessed read the pilgrim’s thoughts routinely. Mind reading proves to be a celestial way of life, for the saints attain ready access to one another’s minds whenever they gaze into the mind of God, which contains them all. The boundaries of the ego are never crossed more conspicuously than when two people fall in love. In Chapter 3, “Lovers: Exchanging Hearts,” I analyze a common yet startling motif that medieval writers used to symbolize that experience. Chrétien de Troyes, the French poet who invented Arthurian romance, popularized the idea that one person’s heart could animate the body of another. The heart, an ancient symbol of interiority and value, was understood medically as the seat of the vital spirit, without which the body cannot live. Yet literature is full of scenes in which parting lovers go their ways, each leaving his or her heart behind with the beloved. In troubadour lyric, the separable heart is a figure of unrequited desire; the beloved lady steals the poet’s heart but refuses to give her own in return. In romance, however, exchanging hearts with a kiss becomes a pledge of mutual belonging and fidelity. The motif of one lover’s heart in the other’s body is a defining emblem of love conceived as the fusion of two selves, an idea that might have seemed totally alien to us until the practice of heart transplants literalized the metaphor and gave it new imaginative life. By the thirteenth century, this romance theme had infiltrated devotional literature, and female mystics began to exchange hearts with Jesus. St. Catherine of Siena, for instance, saw Christ in a vision removing her heart from her chest and replacing it with his own. Twenty years later, Chaucer’s heroine Criseyde, on the brink of falling in love with Troilus, dreams that an eagle opens her breast with his claws and exchanges hearts with her. Each woman henceforth experiences her deepest self as not only belonging to another but in some sense being that other. The topos illustrates a progression from the romantic cliché “I am yours, you are mine” through the formula of coinherence, “I in you and you in me,” to the extreme statement of identity: “I am you, you are me.”28 The consequence of erotic love, in life if not in romance, is often pregnancy. Chapter  4, “Mother and Child: Giving Birth,” considers the physical and emotional coinherence between an expectant mother and her fetus. So mutually imbricated were these two lives that the diet and emotional state of the

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mother, and even her imagination, were thought to have lasting effects on her unborn child. Conversely, the child’s sex and temperament affected the mother no less fundamentally. What may be more surprising is that as soon as the infant was born, one pole of this relationship shifted from the new mother to her surrogate, the wet nurse. As a focal point of immense cultural anxieties, the awesome power of the nurse over the child in her care could result in her being either pampered or persecuted. Midwives, too, participated in this dangerous coinherence. Often blamed when a birth went wrong, often charged with magic, they also wielded the salvific power of lay baptism. A midwife might be asked to perform a postmortem C-section on a woman who had died in labor, snatch the infant from her womb, and sprinkle it with holy water before it perished. This rite could be performed even in the vernacular, and for the child it marked the difference between damnation and eternal life. As for the hapless mother, she could not be buried in the churchyard unless the fetus had first been excised, lest its unbaptized body pollute the consecrated ground. In an interesting thought experiment on social perceptions, Hilary Graham calls attention to an odd structural resemblance between pregnancy and spirit possession. Like the possessed, the pregnant woman “is seen to be invaded by and to interact with an alien being,” whose presence can explain her behavior and, in some cases, exempt her from responsibility.29 Much like a demoniac, she cannot always control or interpret her own actions because “she is under the jurisdiction of the foetus.”30 Only a properly trained specialist can extricate her when the time comes. Yet, again like spirit possession, pregnancy gives her a way to manipulate male authority figures and to achieve a temporary enhancement of her subordinate social status. Graham, however, is no medievalist. Her sources are popular books for expectant mothers from the early 1970s and interviews with fifty pregnant women in Britain. If this parallel still feels salient in modernity, even in Taylor’s “secular age,” it applies a fortiori to the Middle Ages, when belief in spirit possession was universal and the experience itself not rare. It is not surprising then that pregnancy furnished a powerful metaphor for the life of the spirit. Not only bodies but also minds and souls could become pregnant—with ideas, as Socrates had suggested in his analogy of the teacher as midwife, or else with the Christ Child. The infant whom Mary alone bore in her womb might be carried in the spirit by virgins or even men. In fact, God herself was described as eternally pregnant. A Trinitarian theology so committed to the idea of coinherence could not do without the metaphor of pregnancy. Yet, given the gender of most theologians until forty years ago, the image of the forever-pregnant God has been little studied.

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Chapters 1 to 4 all deal with ways of forming the self through the other. The construction of a self through the imprint of texts and teachers, the telepathic reading of minds, the exchange of hearts in love, and the reciprocal influence of mother and fetus all bear witness to the permeable self, with its ethos of “I in you and you in me.” These phenomena are, for the most part, positively constitutive of identity, though never without a dangerous undertow. In Chapter 5 I turn to a more troubling phenomenon, that of actual spirit possession—the loss of self in the other. I ask what happens when the “I” is completely submerged by the “you,” be it God or the devil. In this chapter I pay close attention to the spectrum ranging from “obsession” (in which a demon harasses but does not suppress the personality), to dramatic situations in which human and demonic consciousness appear to share the possessed body, to the terrifying full possession represented by Dante. In the Inferno the poet meets the traitor Fra Alberigo, whom he is surprised to see there because he knows the man is still alive. To his horror, Dante learns that the body of Alberigo, animated by a demon, still walks the earth though his soul is already in the depths of hell. Such total possession finds its counterpart not so much in the ecstatic behavior of saints, as some have claimed, but rather in the mystical theology of annihilation, elaborated most forcefully by Marguerite Porete but followed by many others. Porete, who had no interest in ecstasy or corporeal performances of sainthood, believed freedom and beatitude to consist in total abnegation of the ego, especially its faculties of knowledge and will, such that the divine Self fully replaced human subjectivity and directed all subsequent acts of the body. This understanding of mystical union carried the doctrine of coinherence to its own annihilation. Indwelling becomes full divine possession for as long as the body lives, but after it dies, the soul’s reward is to be not communion with God but a kind of nirvana: absorption in the blissful state of nonbeing “where it [the soul] was before it was created.”31 In condemning Porete’s theology and, after her, certain propositions of Meister Eckhart, the church maintained its belief in irreducible personhood. Despite appearances, the devil cannot and God will not annihilate the human self, which remains forever distinct in the midst of its coinherent relations. Yet a new category of saint, the demonic martyr, posed a fresh challenge to the integrity of the person. On the model of St. Anthony, the athlete of Christ who wrestled with demons in the Egyptian desert, a disturbing new paradigm of female sanctity emerges in the late Middle Ages. Such women as Christine of Stommeln and Ermine of Reims endured demonic harassment, obsession, and physical and psychological torments for months or years on end, proving their virtue through their patience—at the price of their sanity. In examining these

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cases, I focus on what I see as dysfunctional relationships between these women and their clerical supporters, proposing that the priests’ unhealthy fascination with demons—as well as female suffering—served to prolong and aggravate the women’s tortures. In reading these atypical hagiographic texts, it is impossible to ignore the nexus between misguided spiritual direction and mental illness, or to neglect the none-too-hidden continuity between medieval and modern accounts of obsession. Coinherence, in short, is not an unmitigated good. What we now call “codependence” is only the newest term for a very old form of spiritual pathology. Many other relationships could have been chosen for the focus of this book, but I have selected these five partly for the diversity of social contexts they represent. Chapter 1 deals with men and boys, Chapter 4 with women, and Chapters 2, 3, and 5 with different contexts in which the sexes mingled—penance, pastoral counseling, spiritual direction, and romantic love. The educational system studied in Chapter 1 was created by and for elites, while the literary lovers examined in Chapter 3 likewise belong to (and provided models for) the upper strata of society. Chapter 2 deals with a mostly urban milieu in the Low Countries, featuring a wider demographic range. Obviously, women of all classes bore children, but different types of sources examined in Chapter 4 reflect different social strata. Though conduct books and medical writings on pregnancy were composed for elites, folkloric sources open windows onto a wider swath of the population. If the mothers whose regimens were so carefully prescribed by physicians belonged to the privileged class, their wet nurses decidedly did not. The liturgy, created and performed by Latinate clerics, had a powerful influence that cut across all sectors of society. Finally, the two would-be saints featured in Chapter 5 are among the very few peasant women for whom we have lengthy narrative records. As a comparative study in medieval genres, this book draws on texts in a number of languages—principally Latin but also Italian, Old and Middle French, Old Occitan, Middle High German, and Middle English. It is even more fundamentally a work of cultural, psychological, and theological reflection—a set of medieval meditations on the personal. By the same token, it is a very personal meditation on the medieval, or more specifically, on what we might learn from the cluster of motifs, constructions, and perceptions explored here. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own. Biblical quotations are translated directly from the Latin Vulgate, and the numbering of psalms follows the Vulgate as well.

Chapter 1

Teacher and Student Shaping Boys

When our listeners are touched by us as we speak and we are touched by them as they learn, each of us comes to dwell in the other, and so they as it were speak in us what they hear, while we in some way learn in them what we teach. —Augustine, Instructing Beginners in Faith (ca. 403) I beg you, while the face of my mind streams with tears, not to lay your care for me aside by withholding the alms of chastisement and reproof that I need. —Hildegar of Poitiers to his teacher, Fulbert of Chartres (ca. 1025) From our father we received our raw being, but from our teacher our being wise, which is greater and worthier. Good teachers, therefore, should be loved more than parents. —William of Conches, Dialogue on Natural Philosophy (1144–48)

The charismatic teacher has been a compelling but problematic figure in recent culture. From that enduring sentimental favorite Goodbye, Mr.  Chips, to the ubiquitous Harry Potter saga, a long series of novels, plays, and films have examined the social world of boarding school and the extraordinary influence a devoted teacher can have on adolescents, especially at a single-sex school.1 “Give me a girl at an impressionable age,” boasts Miss Jean Brodie in Muriel Spark’s novel, “and she is mine for life.”2 In the cult film Dead Poets Society, an inspiring new

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teacher urges his boys to “make your lives extraordinary” by cultivating a love for poetry and self-expression, until a jealous headmaster determines to bring him down.3 The History Boys, set in another boys’ grammar school, pits the drama of upward mobility—the quest for coveted Oxbridge scholarships—against the complicated sexual dynamics of teachers and students.4 Albus Dumbledore, the powerful wizard and headmaster of Hogwarts, becomes an increasingly complex figure as his relationship with Harry Potter evolves through the course of seven novels, even after his death.5 One of the emotional wellsprings of J. K. Rowling’s series is its sensitive exploration of the mingled love, loyalty, anger, imitation, and bewilderment that such a teacher can evoke as a student matures. Before the invention of universities—a development that occurred in Bologna in 1088, in Paris around 1150—the individual charismatic teacher was the heart and soul of education.6 Teaching litterae et mores, “letters and morals” (or manners), the master was not just an instructor but more important an exemplar, a model for imitation. His learning and his virtues, yes—but also his per­ son, down to his very gait and posture, facial expressions and tone of voice, were set before disciples as a pattern of excellence. “The teacher is the lesson,” C. Stephen Jaeger writes. “The teacher’s appearance, way of walking, talking, and living, is the curriculum.”7 Just as a seal matrix leaves its stamp on soft wax, so the master imprints the disciple’s pliable mind. There could have been no higher praise of a student than to call him a living copy of his master. Medieval pedagogy thus represents an exceptionally powerful method of forming the self through the other, one that remained in force over the longue durée. From Augustine in the fourth century down to Vincent of Beauvais in the thirteenth, educational theorists stressed the vital role of imitation and the significance of the master-student relationship. In the heyday of this model, from the tenth through the twelfth centuries, we find grateful, even worshipful students praising their teachers in a rich array of sources—letters, biographies, panegyrics, and elegies. In this chapter I look first at the theory, then at the practice of charismatic pedagogy, with its far-reaching effects on medieval self-fashioning. Deeply entrenched as it was, the practice inevitably lay open to abuses and critiques, which I also explore. I concentrate, so far as the evidence permits, on individual teacher-student relationships as expressions of love, loyalty, transformation, and at times, betrayal. A final section inquires into the transmission of charisma from the sage to the page, with the construction of the text as immortal teacher.

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The Erotics of Instruction—in Theory St. Augustine was many things, but he was first of all a teacher. As a rhetorician (the late antique version of a law school professor), he taught first in Carthage, then in Rome, then in Milan, rising to the pinnacle of his profession in barely a decade. Conversion led him to take early retirement from that field. But soon after his baptism he opened a Christian Platonist academy, of sorts, with a few close friends and relatives at Cassiciacum. While there he wrote four Socratic dialogues, including De magistro (On the Teacher), that demonstrate his pedagogical style in theory and practice. After he was consecrated bishop of Hippo malgré soi, Augustine quickly established a “monastery” that was in fact more like a seminary, meant to prepare educated Christian teachers for the North African church.8 The episcopal office only intensified his teaching career. In addition to his hundreds of sermons, most of them still extant, Augustine held frequent public disputations with Manichaeans, Donatists, and others. “The heretics themselves,” his biographer Possidius claims, “used to come hurrying with the Catholics with intense eagerness to hear [his books] read aloud,” bringing their own shorthand writers to produce transcripts on the spot.9 A close friend and episcopal colleague, Possidius made it his business to preserve Augustine’s unfathomably prolific output for posterity. With the Vandals besieging Hippo as the master lay dying, the disciple managed to ship Augustine’s entire library to safety in Rome. At the same time, he encouraged all who read his Vita to make as many copies of the master’s books as they could.10 Thanks to that foresight, even as Roman North Africa with its church fell to the barbarians, Augustine’s lifework survived. For a thousand years to come, he remained indisputably the most significant teacher of medieval Europe. Of Augustine’s many works on pedagogy, the most famous is De doctrina christiana (recently translated as Teaching Christianity).11 The most important for our purpose, however, is a little-known treatise, De catechizandis rudibus (Instruct­ ing Beginners in Faith).12 Those “beginners” were men and women of all social classes who had expressed a desire to become Christians, now that the emperor Theodosius had made it materially advantageous to profess that once-dangerous faith. The newcomers, young and old, ranged from rustics to highly cultivated men, from earnest seekers to blatant social climbers. They were to hear a single, introductory talk on Christian doctrine before becoming eligible for the more arduous discipline of the catechumenate. Delivering that talk was a rather mundane task, and around 403 a teacher named Deogratias, suffering from burnout,

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wrote to Augustine for help. Deogratias had grown bored with his own lecture, whose elementary themes no longer held his interest; the passivity of his students discouraged him; and constant requests to repeat the lecture distracted him from more urgent and absorbing work. In short, any reader of this book will know exactly how he felt.13 Augustine patiently replies with directives for formulating the lecture, as well as two model versions. But in between he adds a remarkable section, de hilaritate comparanda: “how to develop a cheerful attitude.” One by one he treats the causes of burnout, ranging from bored and easily offended students to the inadequacy of language before the sublime. And then this: Now, if we find it distasteful to be constantly rehearsing familiar phrases that are suited to the ears of small children, we should draw close to these small children with a brother’s love, or a father’s or a mother’s, and as a result of our empathy with them, the oft-repeated phrases will sound new to us also. For this feeling of compassion is so strong that, when our listeners are touched by us as we speak and we are touched by them as they learn, each of us comes to dwell in the other, and so they as it were speak in us what they hear, while we in some way learn in them what we teach . . . for the more the bond of love allows us to be present in others, the more what has grown old becomes new again in our own eyes as well.14 In this passage Augustine addresses a problem every teacher has faced. Nowadays we might say (if uneasily) that struggling teachers should try harder to “identify with” their students. Augustine offers a precise, theologically inflected version of that advice: through love and empathy or compassion (animi compatientis affectus), the teacher can establish coinherence with the student such that “each of us comes to dwell in the other” (habitemus in invicem). When that happens, roles are exchanged, so what is new to the student becomes new and exciting to the teacher as well. “Each is both teaching, and learning from, the other,” George Howie explains, “since they are linked by a common purpose and in love with the same objectives.”15 Augustine uses the analogy of a man showing a friend the sights of his native city; the visitor’s pleasure renews the delight the host finds in scenes he had come to take for granted. But if this is true even for human works like cities, how much more does it apply to the works of God? In this way, even elementary catechesis can become a source of spiritual renewal for the teacher—and an adventure in charity for teacher and student alike. Such is Augustine’s erotics of instruction.16

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Not only here, but throughout his oeuvre, Augustine insists that teaching is a work of love. All discipline, for example, can be reduced to “coercion and instruction,” the difference being that “coercion is accomplished by fear, instruction by love.”17 In his dialogue On Free Will, Augustine maintains that since learning as such is a good work, so must teaching be, to the extent that “if a man is evil, he is not a teacher; if he is a teacher, he is not evil.”18 Second only to love is the principle of imitation, which looms so large in Augustine’s view that it virtually defines the profession: “Teachers offer themselves for imitation, and this is precisely what people call teaching.”19 That remark appears aptly enough in a dialogue On Music, for if a teacher cannot model expert performance on the violin or flute, the student will not learn it. We are less inclined today to extend the principle to academic subjects. But for Augustine, philosophy and theology were disciplines every bit as practical as flute playing, learned more by imitating a teacher’s life than by mastering concepts. Imitation has close ties to persuasion and thus to his own discipline of rhetoric, which aims to stir the emotions. In a dialogue On the Principle of Order (De ordine), Reason explains to Augustine that dialectic, or logic, “is the discipline which teaches us how to teach and to learn.” Highly intelligent people, when blessed with leisure and a zeal for study, can master it and learn the other liberal arts for themselves. But “only the exceptional mind” is able to grasp truth directly, so the majority must be moved by the emotional seductions of rhetoric to embrace what is good.20 Augustine offers this by way of concession, for he was well aware of the ancient quarrel between philosophy and rhetoric. Being versed in both, he admits that the art of rhetoric is impure but necessary, for without it only a select few could acquire wisdom. Later, in Teaching Chris­ tianity, he acknowledges that an eloquent preacher can benefit people even if his own life is wicked. Yet the hypocritical preacher also undermines his teaching, for “however grand his diction, a speaker’s life has greater weight in determining whether he can be obediently heard.”21 In other words, if the members of an audience know that a teacher doesn’t follow his own counsel, they will be less likely to do so themselves. Students make the greatest progress when they are animated by love to imitate a beloved and admired master. Augustine’s Cassiciacum dialogues vividly illustrate such a pedagogy, full of affectionate banter and appreciation for each student’s individual quirks and ideas. Another, related stream of tradition derives from the Benedictine Rule and Gregory the Great’s Regula pastoralis. These monastic sources are concerned not with academic learning but rather with the twin arts of ruling (praeesse) and helping or profiting (prodesse) religious subordinates.22 St. Benedict presents the

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ideal abbot as a teacher whose “teaching should be a leaven of divine justice kneaded into the minds of his disciples.” He must direct and govern them with twofold teaching (duplici doctrina), that is, by deeds even more than by words. Reproving or encouraging as need requires, now threatening, now coaxing, he should show “now the stern countenance of a master, now the loving affection of a father.”23 So important is this role that when it comes time to elect an abbot, the choice should be made by “merit of life and wisdom of doctrine,” not seniority or social rank (a stipulation widely ignored in medieval monasteries). The abbot ought to be prudent and considerate, hating vices but loving the brethren, always studying “rather to be loved than to be feared.”24 As for the disciple, his place is to be silent and listen, “for speaking and teaching belong to the master.”25 Gregory the Great, the first monk to be elected pope, prescribes a similar role for the pastoral leader (rector) in his Regula pastoralis.26 Gregory takes an extremely high view of pastoral office. One who desires it unworthily imperils his soul, and if he leads others astray by word or example, he will earn a lower place in hell than if he had fallen alone. On the other hand, a man who possesses genuine pastoral gifts but refuses office to preserve his peace of mind will lose the charisms he received in the first place for the benefit of others. The pope’s discussion of this dilemma is a locus classicus for the tension between active and contemplative lives. Nolo episcopari was a topos in antiquity, and as Gregory well knew, Augustine had been made a bishop and Benedict an abbot against their will. Once in office, however, a prelate must be exemplary in thought and conduct, fulfilling the ideals that he preaches. Like the apostle Paul, he is called to become all things to all people (1 Cor. 9:22). Much of Gregory’s work spells out the contrasting admonitions that a preacher should give to rich and poor, the joyful and the sorrowful, slaves and masters, the insolent and the fainthearted, and so forth. As a preaching manual, the Regula pastoralis thus anticipates the elaborate sermones ad status collections of the thirteenth century. But as a guide for teachers in general, it stresses the importance of knowing one’s students. Teaching has to be personalized; a one-size-fits-all model will not do. Together with limited classical sources, these three fathers offered the most important educational thought for the early Middle Ages.27 After the collapse of the old Roman schools, restoration came slowly. But by the mid-tenth century, as Jaeger has shown in a magisterial study, the cathedral schools that arose in such cities as Cologne, Liège, Reims, Chartres, and Würzburg were promoting an important new ideal. The foundation of what Jaeger calls the “old learning,” cultivated first in these Ottonian cathedral schools and later at the abbey of Saint-Victor in Paris, was the study of litterae et mores. Far from an

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empty formula, that phrase encapsulated an actual curriculum widely taught for more than two centuries.28 Litterae, or “letters,” involved study of the Latin classics in prose and verse, with training in composition based on imitating ancient models. But mores, an almost untranslatable term, is more central to understanding the way charismatic authority and imitation shaped elite self-fashioning. Translators have to choose between “manners” and “morals,” but neither term by itself suffices. What mores as a school subject entailed was the acquisition of manners as morals, or the fusion of both to form character. High medieval synonyms included cultus virtutum, the cultivation of virtues; disciplina bene vivendi, the Ciceronian “discipline of living well”; and aesthetic phrases such as venustas and elegantia morum—charming, elegant manners. The ideal is an aristocratic one, recalling the figure of the ancient Greek gentleman as kalos kagathos (“beautiful and good”).29 In medieval schools we see this ideal blended now more, now less, with a tincture of Christian asceticism. But the system was not without its lighter aspects. In the mid-tenth century, for example, the archdeacon Wibold of Noyon devised a board game, the Ludus regularis seu clericalis, to make the best of his students’ love of dicing. Each roll of the dice signified a combination of virtues and a move on the board, as determined by mathematical rules, and the winner was the player who amassed the greatest number of virtues.30 When students misbehaved or failed to learn, they earned a whipping. Indeed, the rod is the standard iconographic attribute of a teacher. At the beginning of Aelfric’s tenth-century Colloquy (in Latin and Old English), a group of students expressly consent to beatings because “we would rather be beaten for the sake of learning than remain ignorant.” But they add that, being a kind man, their master will inflict no blows they do not deserve.31 Other tenth- and eleventhcentury texts reveal a perennial debate about punishment. Some favor the maxim “spare the rod and spoil the child,” while others, such as Paul the Deacon and Egbert of Liège, believed that brutality did more harm than good, weakening the body without forming the mind.32 Even a tongue-lashing could be problematic. One of the most moving texts on this subject is a “vision” Otloh of St. Emmeram experienced, showing him that boys must be corrected with prudence and moderation.33 In the mid-eleventh century, Otloh had been charged with the discipline of novices although he was a young, immature teacher, “still ignorant of my own and others’ weakness.” One day he rebuked an insolent lad before his fellows with unusually harsh, abusive language, only to realize that he had gone too far and had destroyed his own peace of mind. Nightmares kept him awake, so he wept and prayed all night about how to apologize. He knew himself in the wrong, yet feared that if he humbled himself too much, he would undercut his authority.

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Finally the contrite young man himself apologized, begging at the same time that if he should ever fall into vice again, Otloh would correct him gently and privately, “since a harsh public rebuke was not edifying.” In this case, master and student taught each other a lesson about mores. Jaeger stresses the emphasis on mores as a distinctive contribution of the cathedral schools, while Caroline Walker Bynum argues that a desire to teach by example distinguishes the spirituality of regular canons from that of monks. The canons—especially Hugh of Saint-Victor, as we will see—extend their concern with exemplarity from abbots and preachers to ordinary brothers.34 But the themes of cultivating mores and imitating an exemplary master are also present, if less salient, in monastic texts. John of Fruttuaria, an eleventh-century abbot known as Johannes Homo Dei, wrote the earliest medieval treatise on the formation of novices (ca. 1030–49). A florilegium, it often passed under the name of St. Bernard and thus enjoyed considerable influence. Organized around the theme of virtues and vices, John’s treatise predictably endorses verecundia, or modesty, as the key virtue for adolescents. But when he discusses that virtue, he borrows wholesale from St. Ambrose’s late fourth-century text, De officiis. Ambrose in turn echoes Cicero on the style of gesture and behavior proper to an orator. Thus the Italian abbot transmits a thoroughly classical ideal for the monk’s comportment, encoding the same fusion of physical and moral cultivation that was central to the cathedral schools: Modesty must be maintained even in our movements and gestures, in the way we walk—for the condition of the mind can be discerned from the state of the body. Hence people judge the hidden man of our heart (1 Pet. 3:4) to be rather frivolous, or boastful, or troubled, or on the contrary quite serious, steady, chaste, and mature. Bodily movement, therefore, is like a voice of the spirit, for often the gait betrays the quality of the mind. In some people’s walk you see the very image of frivolity; they look like wandering jesters. Others by their slow, artificial way of walking imitate the gestures of actors, or move like statues tottering on their litters in a procession. With every step they take, they seem to be performing some kind of dance measure. I also think it indecent to walk too fast, unless some danger or genuine need requires it. So often we see people hurrying along, out of breath, their faces all twisted out of shape. If no real cause requires such haste, it is a blemish that justly gives offense.35

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The monk who moves with a showy, undisciplined gait betrays a lack of inner harmony, a mind as frivolous and immature as his laughable way of walking. To achieve a virtuous gait, neither too slow nor too fast, he must exemplify the golden mean. Still echoing Ambrose, John warns that physical beauty must not be confused with virtue. Easily wasted by fever or destroyed by old age, it has no value compared with inner beauty. But then, surprisingly, he adds that “just as an artist can do better work with more fitting material, so too modesty is more outstanding in a beautiful body”—provided that its beauty is simple, natural, and virile. “For this is what it means to maintain a beautiful way of life, to render what is due to each sex and every person. This is the finest way of movement; this is the adornment fitting for every action.”36 How can a young monk acquire this ordo gestorum optimus, this beautiful ornatus, to accompany his every act? By imitating the older monks, “for just as the company of peers is sweeter, that of the seniors is safer. By a kind of teaching and by the way they lead their lives (magisterio quodam et ductu vitae), they color the mores of adolescents” as dye colors fabric—and not just any dye, but the royal purple of righteousness. Thus “there is a beautiful bond between the seniors and the young monks,” even as the elderly St. Peter and the youthful St. John delighted in each other’s company.37 No art can be learned without a teacher. So if a novice studiously imitates the best in his community (ignoring angry, stubborn old monks who have not mastered their own vices), he will learn through teaching and discipline (studia doctrinae et disciplinae assiduitas) how to regulate his passions and acquire the beauty of virtues. Deeply rooted in patristic ethical doctrine, John’s treatise at the same time promotes an aristocratic ideal of the morally beautiful life, pulchritudo vivendi, manifested in harmonious gestures and movements. The “teaching” John ascribes to the older monks is conveyed less by words than by example, for it is only “a kind of teaching” revealed through “the conduct of life.” Unlike Benedict’s ideal abbot, these elders have no explicit pedagogical role. Their example, like dye, is absorbed through osmosis and the force of loving imitation. A century and a half later, the Cistercian abbot Adam of Perseigne advises a novice master on how to form beginners (ca. 1190–96). Again he stresses the power of love, exemplary conduct, and imitation. “The novice master’s religious demeanor . . . should be presented to the novice as in a mirror. When there is set before him close at hand an example of good conduct, he is stimulated more effectively to desire to imitate it.”38 In other words, the master consciously assumes his exemplary role, and the novice just as consciously strives to imitate

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him—though the process has a deeper, intuitive dimension on both sides. Since novices often suffer from acedia (depression or sloth), the master should take pains to inspire them with frequent conferences on Scripture, saints’ Lives, and heaven and hell—both to motivate them in their spiritual strug gles and to deepen that “worthy intimacy by which the master is rendered bolder to reprove and the one reproved more ready to submit to instruction.”39 Like Benedict’s abbot, the master should teach both verbo et exemplo, and like Gregory’s rector, he should carefully consider each novice’s condition and adapt his teaching to the novice’s specific needs. Love will render his words bolder, his example more efficacious, and the relationship between them more fruitful. Another abbot, Wibald of Stavelot and Corvey, advises a new teacher in 1148 to “let your mere presence be a course of studies for your students.”40 Learning will take place where the master’s charisma and the student’s devotion meet. Secular masters express similar views. William of Conches (ca. 1090–1155) had been a student of the celebrated Bernard of Chartres, whom he replaced as magister around 1125 when Bernard retired. Eventually he became private tutor to the sons of Geoffrey Plantagenet, one of whom was the young Henry II. In the last chapter of his Dragmaticon philosophiae (Dialogue on Natural Philoso­ phy), William includes some interesting remarks on teaching and learning. The ideal teacher, he says, should teach “for the sole love of wisdom”—for if he is motivated by the love of gain, he will be tempted to teach pleasing trifles instead of sound knowledge, and if he seeks his own praise, he may “secretly withhold teaching out of jealousy” to avoid being surpassed by his own students.41 Conversely, the ideal student is humbly prepared to imitate his master, for he should “love his teacher like a father or even more than a father. For we should have more love for the one from whom we have received greater and more worthy gifts. From our father we received our raw being (rudes esse), but from our teacher our being wise (esse sapientes), which is greater and worthier. Good teachers, therefore, should be loved more than parents. . . . For if we do not love someone, even his good qualities often displease us and we shun them, while we try hard not to imitate those we do not love.”42 John of Salisbury (ca. 1120–80) studied with both Peter Abelard and William of Conches. In the course of an eventful career, he served as secretary to Thomas Becket and finally as bishop of Chartres. John’s Metalogicon is our earliest witness to the famous saying ascribed to Bernard of Chartres: like dwarves perched on the shoulders of giants, we see further than they, “not because we have keener vision or greater height, but because we are lifted up and borne aloft on their gigantic stature” (Fig. 1).43 The judicious maxim, balancing filial pietas

Figure 1 On the shoulders of giants. Encyclopedic manuscript, southern Germany, ca. 1410. Washington, Library of Congress, Rosenwald ms. 4, fol. 5r (detail). Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

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with a sense of real progress over time, conveys the best of the old learning. It assumes its most famous visual form in the south transept of Chartres Cathedral, where a window depicts the four evangelists seated on the shoulders of Old Testament prophets. John also echoes William’s view of teachers as surrogate fathers. In his Policraticus, he cites Quintilian’s Institutiones oratoriae and notes that because the love of teachers (amor docentium) is one of the seven keys of learning, “teachers should be loved and honored just like parents. For even as parents generate bodies, teachers generate spirits . . . they beget wisdom in the minds of their hearers, as it were, reforming nature for the better. And this filial piety contributes a great deal to study. For students gladly listen to those they love, and believe their words, and desire to be like them; and through filial affection, joyful and lively throngs of students gather around them.”44 Such advice was more realistic than not. A typical medieval schoolboy in fact knew his master better than his father, who played little part in his upbringing. Sent away from the family home at the age of seven, he lived day and night under his tutor’s watchful eye, and it was this teacher whose love and admiration he craved, whose reproof and punishment he feared.45 The correspondence of masters and old students, as Mia Münster-Swendsen observes, is more intimate and affectionate than that of parents and their grown children.46 By far the most significant educational treatise of this era is Hugh of SaintVictor’s De institutione nouitiorum (On the Formation of Novices, ca. 1125). This is the prequel to Hugh’s better-known Didascalicon, a manual of all the liberal and mechanical arts, with its famous advice to “learn everything.”47 That treatise focuses on studies, while De institutione treats mores. It was a hugely influential text: at least 181 complete and 13 fragmentary manuscripts are known.48 Hugh wrote for novices aspiring to the life of regular canons at Saint-Victor, but his work was used by monks and friars of all orders, including the Dominican master general Humbert of Romans. The Grandmontines ascribed it to one of their own priors, and in the thirteenth century it became integral to secular courtesy books. Vincent of Beauvais incorporated parts of it into his work on educating sons of the nobility (De eruditione filiorum nobilium), while Giles of Rome adapted it in sections of his De regimine principum. Gerard Zerboldt of the Devotio Moderna also made use of the treatise. In short, Hugh’s thinking on disciplina and mores speaks not only for his immediate time and context but for a large swath of religious and secular culture as well. The core concept of De institutione is disciplina, which should not be reduced to its English cognate. The word derives from discere, to learn, and ac-

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quiring disciplina is the full-time job of a discipulus, or student.49 On the one hand, it refers to the whole curriculum or course of studies, while on the other, it is an expansive moral concept: Discipline is a good and honorable way of living. It is a small thing for it to avoid doing evil; rather, it strives even in the things it does well to appear blameless in every way. Or again, discipline is the wellordered movement of all parts of the body; it is a fitting disposition in every state and action. . . . It fetters cupidity, imprisons evil desires, reins in lust, yokes pride, chains wrath, tames intemperance, binds levity, and quells all the disorderly impulses of the mind and its unruly appetites. Disordered motions of the body stem from inconstancy in the mind, and conversely, when the body is restrained by discipline, the mind is fortified by constancy. And thus the mind is gradually led to inner peace as, by observing discipline, it is not allowed to express its wicked e/motions (motus) outwardly.50 Two points deserve special note. First, appearances matter: a disciplined, morally excellent person must not only be but also appear to be above reproach. In contrast to later medieval ethics (and his own contemporaries, Abelard and Heloise), Hugh does not worry about hypocrites—people who appear to be, but are not in fact, blameless.51 Second, the role of the body is crucial. Discipline is membrorum omnium motus ordinatus: it requires physical grace, elegant and fluent movements. This begins with restraint of all the fidgeting and horseplay natural to boys. So Hugh satirizes pupils who listen with wide-open mouths, stick out their tongues like dogs, roll their eyes when they speak, shake out their hair, fuss with their clothing, and so forth, for all those mannerisms “deform the beauty of the face and the comeliness of discipline.” Instead, a properly disciplined face should display “an austere sweetness and a sweet austerity” (rigidam dulcedinem et dulcem rigorem).52 Because virtue is a mean between extremes, every physical act should be “graceful without softness, relaxed without laxity, sober without slothfulness, brisk without turbulence.”53 Expanding on the satire of Ambrose and John of Fruttuaria, Hugh lists six ludicrous ways of walking that deviate from this golden mean: “There are six kinds of reprehensible gesture and movement, namely, an effeminate glide, a swagger, a listless shuffle, a hasty stride, a wanton strut, and a turbulent dash. The effeminate step indicates lasciviousness; the swagger, slovenliness, the shuffle, laziness; the stride, inconstancy; the strut, pride; the dash, wrathfulness.”54 To avoid all immodest and unbecoming

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gestures, a novice must learn to smile without showing his teeth, speak without gesticulating, walk without swinging his arms, sit without crossing his legs, and lie down without splaying his limbs. It is this relentless yet attainable discipline of the body that produces the sublime moral effects Hugh sets forth: self-restraint “fetters cupidity, imprisons evil desires,” and all the rest. Rather than beginning with the demand to repress vicious desires, Hugh’s program of moral training works from the outside in. The same word, motus, in medieval Latin denotes both “motions” and “emotions,” and Hugh starts from the premise that if these unruly impulses are checked at their source and denied outward expression, they will gradually disappear within the mind as well, leading it to genuine peace. It is, in short, a most un-Freudian program. But it seems to have worked within its context, for the abbey of SaintVictor attracted many eager recruits who went on to high positions in both the church and secular courts. We are fortunate to have a poem by one of them, Godfrey of Saint-Victor, who entered the abbey in the 1150s and studied under Hugh’s famous successor, Richard of Saint-Victor. Godfrey had already studied the liberal arts and theology in Paris, so he was hardly a boy when he entered at the age of thirty or so. Nonetheless, he describes his experience of the Victorine ethical training as nothing short of rebirth for his body and mind: This teacher’s elegance, I confess, The counselors’ integrity, the skillful ministers Whose looks show no taint of the perverse— Overcome me and draw me into their snare. I am compelled by the very face of things to attend And cling, as I lie prone, to the master’s feet. Such teachings resound from his mouth! They ravish me—or rather restore me to myself. At first I was ravished and estranged from myself, Intoxicated by the streams I had followed. Then I was restored to myself, recreated with new wine— And my former state began to be renewed. The first draughts of Ethics pour into me: Childish emotions are knocked out of my mind.

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Cleansed outwardly as well, in dress and body, I am utterly transformed in marvelous newness. My tongue, long restless and strident, Grows quiet from that effective drink. My depleted soul is invigorated; My body, unsettled till now, steadied like a pillar.55 Godfrey supplies a priceless testimonial to the program of disciplina formulated by Hugh and maintained by Richard. Today Richard of Saint-Victor is remembered as a profound mystical theologian, but what Godfrey recalls is his elegantia. He must certainly have been charismatic, for this new disciple at the master’s feet felt “ravished” by his teaching. Godfrey’s language (raptus, alien­ atus, recreatus) echoes Richard’s mystical lexicon, but Godfrey is talking about something more basic and fundamental than divine contemplation. As he embarks on the course of disciplina, the disciple’s unregenerate self must be melted down and recast—constituting both an estrangement from self and a restoration of the true self, created in God’s image. Godfrey describes this process with another mystical metaphor, that of sober intoxication. The “new wine” (temeto nouo) that inebriates him is the master’s charismatic presence, which “radiates a force to the students, dips them in its magic aura and transforms them in his image and likeness.”56 Just as Hugh had established in De institutione, the process of disciplining the body drives “childish emotions” (pueriles motus) out of the mind, tames the unruly tongue, and revives the soul, while the body itself is “steadied like a pillar” or a goalpost ( figitur ut meta). Godfrey’s ode to disciplina celebrates self-restraint and inner transformation, but “discipline” had another, more concrete meaning: it could denote flagellation or the whip used to administer it.57 This practice, avidly promoted by Peter Damian in the eleventh century, also has a place in the customary of Saint-Victor.58 The Liber ordinis S. Victoris, written around 1116 by the first abbot, Gilduin, gives detailed instructions on how a brother is to receive disciplina in the chapter of faults. Naked above the waist, he should lie on the ground and endure his beating in silence. If he must speak, he may say only Mea culpa. Ego me emendabo (It’s my fault—I will correct myself), while the brothers silently watch until the abbot calls a halt.59 At Saint-Victor, this kind of disciplina was a punishment imposed by superiors, not a self-inflicted penance as it was for Peter Damian. Hence the abbot’s whip was a direct successor to the schoolmaster’s rod.

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One more aspect of Hugh’s treatise deserves attention, and that is his own account of the role imitation plays in pedagogy. Here he falls back on the ancient metaphor of the seal.60 Hugh is not discussing memory, the usual referent of that image, but rather the formation of character. In a chapter “on imitating the examples of holy men,” he writes: “Why do you suppose, brethren, that we are commanded to imitate the life and conduct of good men, except to be refashioned by imitating them into the likeness of the New Life? In them, indeed, we see the express form of God’s likeness. So when we are imprinted by imitating them, we too are configured to the image of his likeness. But you must know that just as wax cannot receive an impression unless it has first been softened, a human being is not bent into a virtuous form by another’s hand unless he is first softened by humility to remove all the stiffness of pride and contrariness.”61 Humility is not just a virtue in the eyes of God; it requires the student to humble himself before the teacher in voluntary obedience—the better to absorb his divine imprint. With his exegetical subtlety, Hugh adds that the stamped wax is an inverse image of the seal matrix: what is carved in negative on the seal leaves a raised impression, and vice versa. This suggests that the sublime qualities of the saint or master—those carved in relief, as it were—should be hollowed out in the disciple. Conversely, what appears as negative in the saintly model— marks of humility—should be raised up in the copy, “for when we imitate their deeds, we should conceal what is sublime and outwardly show what is abject.”62 The same rationale applies whether the student is imitating Christ, the saints, or his teacher, for education lays down a template that remains in force throughout the disciple’s life. Unlike sealing wax, however, the student is not passive but must strive with all his energy to accept the imprint of his teacher. The Victorines were not monks, and many of their students were not destined to become canons either, for their school was open to outsiders. For these secular students, the training available at Saint-Victor afforded an avenue to high office in the church. The school’s emphasis on outward grace, elegance, and refined bearing required a kind of asceticism quite different from that of monks. But it also had a worldly cast, inherited from Cicero through Ambrose. In an age when the episcopal office required a commanding personal presence, when charisma still outweighed bureaucratic and legal skills, bishops as well as abbots not only were, but also needed to act like, aristocrats. Hence the cultivation of virtue in the Victorine sense, as a force made visible in the body, “was not entirely disinterested personal ethical formation . . . but also a study that shaped men for the service of church and state.”63 As inheritors of the cathedral school ethos, the twelfth-century Victorines provided an important via media between the asceti-

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cism of reformed monks and the urbanity of secular courts. If all went well, the friendship forged between master and students could serve as a precursor to the love of king and courtiers, as Jaeger points out, or the first stage in the development of a powerful Old Boy network.64 To be sure, this system did not please its less worldly observers. Hugh of Fouilloy, for instance, denounces the “courtier monk” (curialis monachus) as one of the twelve worst abuses of religious life.65 Yet the strength of the reaction betrays the power of the ideal. The twelfth-century Victorines understood the kind of education that the elites of their society needed, in their time and long afterward, and supplied it with consummate skill.

Charismatic Teaching in Practice: Three Case Studies Unlike classical antiquity or late medieval universities, the schools of the charismatic masters produced few theoretical or philosophical texts. The genres they produced instead are telling: biographies, letter collections, poems exchanged between masters and students, polemics between rival schools, panegyrics in praise of teachers, planctus lamenting their deaths, and mock invective that allowed a student to express rebellion, though in the end he always returned obediently to the fold.66 All these genres are highly personal, focused not on academic subjects but on the person of the master. To show how this practice of charismatic teaching evolved over the course of a century, I will focus on three well-documented examples. Two are now rather obscure: Fulbert of Chartres (ca. 970–1028) and Goswin of Liège and Mainz (ca. 1000–ca. 1075). The third, St. Anselm of Bec and Canterbury (1033–1109), needs no introduction. I mean especially to scrutinize the personal relationships between each master and his favorite (or most troublesome) students. Fulbert produced no distinguished works of philosophy or theology, so his reputation has not survived to the present day. But in his own time and long afterward, he was known as a highly effective, saintly bishop, an exemplar of learning, and a teacher whose charisma drew students from all over Europe. Fulbert is the first recorded master to have taught at what would become the celebrated school of Chartres. Neither a monk nor of high birth, he owed his advancement to his own studies with the master Gerbert of Reims in the 990s. By 1004 he was established as scholasticus, or schoolmaster, at Chartres, where he may also have served as chancellor. In 1006 King Robert nominated him to the city’s high-ranking bishopric, which he held until his death in 1028. After a fire destroyed Chartres Cathedral in 1020, he devoted much of his time and effort

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to fundraising for a new church. His writings include a letter collection, sermons, and a few poems.67 The best place to begin our study of Fulbert is some twenty years after his death. Like most experienced teachers he had a black sheep, in this case one of his brightest students—Berengar of Tours (ca. 1000–1088). After his studies with Fulbert, Berengar became head of his own cathedral school at Tours around 1040, and in the 1050s he provoked a major theological controversy by denying Christ’s substantial presence in the Eucharist.68 For our purpose, the key point in that debate is one of style rather than substance. Like Abelard, Berengar had a mind swayed more by argument than by charisma.69 On seeing him stray from “the footsteps of the holy fathers” into the “snares and scandals” of heresy, one of his fellow students tried to recall him to the narrow path by writing an effusive, nostalgic letter. Adelmann of Liège, a Fulbert loyalist, summoned up memories of their beloved teacher to conjure his old school chum: To his beloved brother in Christ, the scholasticus Berengar, from Adelmann: greetings in the Lord. I have called you my foster brother because of that sweetest fellowship I used to enjoy with such delight, when you were a young boy and I somewhat older, in the academy of Chartres under that venerable Socrates of ours. We are allowed to boast of his intimacy even more fittingly than Plato boasted . . . in the days of his Socrates. . . . For we experienced a still more holy life and a more wholesome teaching from a Catholic and most Christian man, and now we must hope to be helped by his prayers before God. . . . Beyond any doubt he is mindful of us, even more loving than when he traveled as a pilgrim in the body of this death (Rom. 7:24)—and he invites us to himself with his desires and silent prayers. He bears witness by those private evening conversations he so often held with us in the little garden by the chapel, concerning that City that he now possesses, God willing, as a senator. And he beseeches us by the tears he sometimes shed, gushing forth in mid-speech as his holy ardor impelled them, that we might hasten to that City with all our zeal, walking in the direct and royal way, following with perfect observance in the footsteps of the holy fathers.70 This is the effusive new language of friendship that would soon make its way from the cathedral schools (Fulbert’s in particular) into the monasteries.71 Adelmann remembers the late Fulbert as a “Socrates” and Chartres as an “acad-

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emy,” not because there was anything Platonic about the school’s curriculum, but to evoke the allure of a charismatic master. Even greater than Socrates, Fulbert as a good Catholic lives on after death, and his presence never forsakes his own. Overcome with emotion, Adelmann recalls the master’s evening colloquies in the chapel garden when Fulbert himself would be overcome, shedding spontaneous tears as he yearned for the City of God. To strengthen his appeal, Adelmann also sent Berengar a long panegyric that he had composed some time after Fulbert’s death. The poem is an acrostic, its twenty-three stanzas following the alphabet from A to Z in an extravagant lament for the teacher: Glory of the city of Chartres, unforgettable bishop! When I try to speak of you first, father Fulbert, Words fail me, my heart melts, my tears flow anew As I bewail one by one the many things I recall. As a familiar friend, I often clung to the old man’s side While my ear drank from the golden fount of his honeyed tongue. Alas! How noble was his moral diligence, How serious he was in deeds, how sweet in words, As he explained the mysteries of higher learning! Studies flourished in France under your care, You refined both divine and human teachings; Never did you let virtue be oppressed by want. As a lofty spring feeds many a trustworthy river, As a fire spreads out into many smaller flames, So many distinguished men you sent far and wide.72 Playing St. John to Fulbert’s Christ, Adelmann reclines at his side, imbibing from “the golden fount of his honeyed tongue.” But just when we might expect a fuller account of Fulbert’s teachings (altioris archana scientiae), Adelmann takes an unexpected turn and lists not the master’s doctrines but his students, naming some fifteen men—all by then deceased—with their claims to fame and the positions once held by each. Fulbert probably never taught more than ten or twelve students at a time, and convention dictated that those still living should not be named, so this list represents a long and distinguished career.73 The

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master is the abundant spring from which so much learning flowed or the fire that lighted so many candles. His charisma rested on his eloquence, his gravitas and dignitas, and his moralis industria, but its proof lay in the success of his students, the Old Boys who had gone on to brilliant careers. Meanwhile, the “divine and human teachings” that he so fruitfully cultivated remain vague. Berengar, at any rate, was unimpressed. He responded to Adelmann’s letter and poem with a tag from Horace’s Ars poetica: the mountains labor, and nascitur ridiculus mus (a silly mouse is born).74 During the eucharistic controversy, the theologian Guitmund of Aversa tried to discredit Berengar by ridiculing his fake charisma. As a student he had failed to show proper deference, Guitmund charged, so when he in turn became a master, he could only feign the authority he had never earned. When this fellow was still a schoolboy—as those who knew him then declare—he was so puffed up by his supposed genius that he paid no attention to his teacher’s message, held his fellow students in contempt, and moreover despised books on the liberal arts. But as he was unable to penetrate the secrets of higher philosophy on his own (for he was not that clever a man), . . . he affected, through new interpretations of mere words (in which even now he takes too much delight), to arrogate to himself praise and glory in every branch of knowledge by whatever means he could. Though he was almost completely ignorant, he professed to be a doctor of arts, faking the dignity of a master rather than showing it in substance, by his pompous way of walking and standing above others on a lofty podium. He would also deceive the unwary by burying his head in his cowl to simulate long meditation— and finally, after they had waited long enough to hear his voice, he would slowly drawl out some remarks as if in mourning.75 This memorable portrait skewers the affectations that teachers like Hugh of Saint-Victor aimed to suppress through disciplina. At the same time, it reveals a broader weakness of the old learning as it appeared to advocates of the new—its tendency to conceal a lack of substance behind the grandeur of an impressive façade. Perhaps Berengar himself had seen Fulbert as Guitmund in turn saw Berengar—an intellectual fraud, all pomp and eloquence, no genuine learning. If this heretic embodies the “wrong” attitude toward the authority of a master, one of his fellow students expresses the ideal. To Fulbert’s star pupil, Hildegar, Adelmann of Liège pays the ultimate compliment: “He became a copy of the

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master in the expression of his face, his voice, his manners.”76 In Hildegar’s case, Fulbert’s correspondence shows how important the master-student relationship remained long after a student had moved on. Late in his career, Fulbert was appointed treasurer of the Church of Saint-Hilaire in Poitiers. But the press of business at Chartres, combined with ill-health and warfare, constantly frustrated his plans to visit that city, so he appointed Hildegar as his deputy. In a long series of letters, he sends his old student news, books, answers to exegetical questions, and administrative counsel. He includes a bit of advice on teaching: “I also wish to remind you when you are construing Donatus not to mix in any unseemly levity by way of amusement, but keep everything serious. Remember that you are on show, and take care.”77 Elementary Latin grammar (Donatus) was not the most exciting subject, so Hildegar’s students—like ours—might have welcomed a little levitas. But Fulbert advises gravitas because a master must keep up his dignity, and then adds that astonishing sentence: Spectaculum enim factus es, caue! (You’ve become a spectacle, watch out!) A teacher, especially a new or young one, is always on display; any misstep can be used against him. Hildegar may have been feeling vulnerable because, around the same time, he wrote to Fulbert to ask forgiveness for yielding to anger in public. His letter poignantly expresses the filial piety a beloved teacher could command: “Without flattery I confess the simple truth: I have bidden my inmost soul to love you above all mortals. I have been subject to your teaching, by God’s gracious care, since I was a child, and I have never revealed so many secrets of my conscience to anyone else. To others I have told some, but to you I have revealed all. So I beg you, while the face of my mind streams with tears, not to lay your care for me aside by withholding the alms of chastisement and reproof that I need. For if you do this (may God’s mercy forbid it!), no blow will ever strike me so cruelly as seeing myself so neglected by you.”78 This sounds more like something a devout penitent might say to a confessor: Hildegar abjectly begs for his old teacher’s reproach. A year or two later, he is still lamenting that he is out of his depth as Fulbert’s deputy: “I am inexperienced and need your instructions daily.”79 We might be tempted just to write him off as an unusually needy soul, but in this era, letters of that sort are not uncommon. The career Fulbert carved out left a long afterglow, and by 1100 his fame had spread far and wide. His friend Odilo of Cluny wrote that with his death “zeal for wisdom perished in France,” while others called him a “keen and sharpwitted philosopher,” “a marvelous doctor of modern times,” “preeminent in the liberal arts,” “adorned with wisdom.” Although never canonized, he is often depicted as a saint, and Rome eventually approved the observance of his feast day at

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Chartres and Poitiers. But why Poitiers? As an absentee treasurer, Fulbert never did manage to visit his church there. Nevertheless, a fresco at Saint-Hilaire portrays him with a halo and the inscription “Fulbert of Chartres, prelate most erudite in holy wisdom.”80 This is surely a testament to Hildegar’s loyal devotion. My second case study, Goswin of Mainz (d. ca. 1075), is a less attractive yet revealing figure. Born in the early eleventh century, Goswin (or Gozechinus) studied at the monastery of Fulda. By 1044 he had succeeded Fulbert’s student Adelmann as scholasticus at the cathedral school in Liège. There he remained until Archbishop Liutpold of Mainz (reg. 1051–59) invited him to accept the same post in that city. Goswin continued his teaching career in Mainz until around 1065, when he wished to retire—a decision that proved unexpectedly fraught. For the old master now wanted to return to Liège, but he had ruined his reputation there by writing a polemic against his old school when he assumed his duties at the new one.81 Such interschool rivalries were a familiar feature of the landscape, but they could leave a bitter aftertaste. Goswin’s plight can be compared with that of a cantankerous Harvard professor who, on moving to Yale, had been indiscreet enough to tweet that the overrated Crimsons could not compete with the charms of New Haven. If ten years later he were to angle for a pleasant sinecure in Cambridge, his chances would be slim. Even so, Goswin, having once poisoned the waters in Liège, now praised that city to the skies in a letter to his old student, Walcher, in the hope—futile, as it turned out—of being invited back.82 His “pedantic and turgid missive” survives in a single manuscript.83 In it Goswin wields the same rhetoric of fervent affection that we have seen in the effusions of Adelmann and Hildegar. But this time the tables are turned. The master must seduce his old student all over again, for he hopes that Walcher— now himself a teacher in Liège—will be able to smooth the path for his return. So, in page after page of ardent prose, Goswin professes his love. On seeing Walcher’s fine handwriting (in a manuscript that does not survive), he “rejoiced that I had once guided you with my own hand in forming those crude characters and made you atone with strokes on your back for those ill-turned lines and other sins of tender youth, since now I can rejoice in the rich harvest.”84 As he recalls old tenderness and whippings in the same breath, Goswin invites his reader to become a schoolboy again, to be pliable wax in the master’s hand. Walcher, he remembers, had once “hung on the very motion of my lips, lest any of my words should fall to the earth.”85 It was this devotion, this “eminent sign of virtue,” that first prompted Goswin’s love. While his other students fell short, Walcher alone achieved the ideal: like Hildegar, he became a perfect copy of his

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teacher. “You seemed able to transform yourself altogether into the master,” Goswin fondly recalls.86 As his most promising student matured, Goswin cherished him all the more: “Intimacy . . . served to enshrine you more deeply in my regard, and each passing day rendered you dearer and fresher.”87 The flattery flows on and on, finally debouching into even more exalted praise of “Mother Liège . . . that second Athens.” As it turns out, though, all is not well between Goswin and Walcher. The student had not forgotten his old master’s abrupt, ungracious departure, and we gradually learn that Walcher’s previous letter had not been all sweetness and light. On hearing of Goswin’s desire to return to Liège, he had cited verses of Horace against him, accusing him of vacillation and inconstancy. He may also have suggested that Goswin was too young to retire or, at any rate, questioned his motives: was not his sudden desire for contemplative leisure just a flight from his duties? Goswin feels that he must respond to these charges, but he does not wish to antagonize Walcher any further. So he rhetorically divides his reader in two with a cunning captatio benevolentiae: “Whatever I have said in these polemics that is excellent, elegant, amiable, applies to you; and whatever is harsh, abrasive, biting, to my detractors.”88 In other words, even if Walcher had become (for the moment) one of those “detractors” in need of a harsh reply, Goswin invites him now to distance himself from that hostile crowd, to be once again the favorite student and friend in whose love he had basked. Read in this light, Goswin’s letter sounds more than a little manipulative. But at the same time, it expresses a truth that every seasoned teacher discovers. After years of training, nurturing, mentoring, and recommending students, the tables do turn. As we hear in many a retirement speech and read in many a festschrift, the time comes when it is the teacher who stands to gain from old students’ loyalties. “Academia as a community still retains many of the old charismatic structures,” as MünsterSwendsen writes, “although they have been regulated and solidified by ritual and codification, and institutionalized in rites of passage.”89 Goswin’s epistolary treatise tells us a great deal about the old learning and its discontents. It may read like the plaint of any aging pedagogue about wayward youth and the Evils of Modern Times, but those evils are quite specific. “Liberal studies,” Goswin laments, “are prized less than mimes and actors. They seem to go practically begging through the taverns, and Money philosophizes about them!”90 Corrupted by avarice, teachers have grown lax, while beatings, alas, have gone out of fashion. So the young, fleeing from “moral discipline,” are blown about by every wind of doctrine as they do homage to “vain and pestiferous novelties”—the worst of them being the heresy of “that apostle of Satan, Berengar.”91 Here Goswin’s

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complaint dovetails with that of his predecessor, Adelmann of Liège. In the eyes of both men, Berengar was not just a heretic and heresiarch but a new kind of teacher, an irreverent rationalist, whose disciples “seek to encompass God within the boundaries of nature, and to confine within human reason that which surpasses the reason of any rational creature.”92 Similar laments were voiced by Meinhard of Bamberg and other masters of the old learning around the same time. They saw disciplina threatened not only as an ideal but also as a school subject, for the curriculum was changing—growing more philosophical and less centered on mores.93 Goswin implies that this new learning was motivated by greed: masters had discovered that they could earn more if they spared the rod and stimulated the mind. Even as he maligns these new teachers, comparing them to “mimes and actors,” Goswin must admit that they too have charisma, however debased its form. Guitmund of Aversa thought the appeal of Berengar pompous and fraudulent but could not deny that he held the attention of a crowd. We might even speak of a “new charisma” that manifested itself not like the old, in the formation of individual students through rapt imitation of their master, but in displays of theatrical, crowd-pleasing brilliance. The performative persona now took precedence over the inner one, the “hidden person of the heart” (1 Pet. 3:4). Although Goswin felt that his retirement marked the end of an era, the old model was far from dead. Fifty years later, we see an eerily similar conflict played out between Peter Abelard and his bêtes noires, William of Champeaux and Anselm of Laon. The future in fact belonged to all three. Abelard pioneered the aggressive new dialectic that became the mainstay of scholasticism, while Anselm of Laon’s Glossa ordinaria, compiled with the help of his students, would dominate biblical exegesis for centuries to come. As for William, he retired from teaching in Paris to found the abbey of Saint-Victor—where, as we have seen, the reinvigorated study of litterae et mores achieved its finest flowering. But these were not the only contexts for charismatic teaching. My third case study, St.  Anselm of Bec, taught in a Benedictine abbey. Unlike Fulbert of Chartres or Goswin of Mainz, he transcends his age and looms large even now in the history of philosophy and theology. But my concern is with Anselm the teacher, as we meet him in his letters, his students’ memories, and his disciple Eadmer’s remarkable Vita. Born in Aosta in 1033, Anselm studied with his fellow Lombard, Lanfranc of Pavia (1010–89), at the Norman monastery of Bec. At first blush, he seems to have fulfilled the axiom that a student should become his master, for he would succeed Lanfranc first as prior of Bec (1063–78), then as an abbot (1078–93), and finally as archbishop of Canterbury (1093–1109). As R. W. Southern observes,

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however, the two men could scarcely have been less alike, for “Anselm was all fire within; Lanfranc all energy of mind and activity.”94 A jurist, scholar, administrator, and polemical disputant, Lanfranc excelled in practical affairs, while Anselm was a man of rare philosophical genius but lacked worldly savoir faire. During his tenure as archbishop, Anselm was warned that his own staff were cheating him, but he simply refused to believe it: “Are they not Christians? And if they are Christians would they knowingly lie, contrary to their fealty, for some temporal advantage? It is out of the question.”95 With such an unworldly attitude, Anselm was easy prey for ruthless and conniving men, and the monks of Canterbury compared him unfavorably with his predecessor, Lanfranc. It is not on temporal achievements that his reputation rests.96 As teachers, Lanfranc and Anselm had contrasting strengths. Lanfranc had been a secular magister at Avranches before he became a monk at the struggling new foundation of Bec. Abbot Herluin quickly persuaded him to open a school there for external pupils, partly as a fundraising measure. This proved to be a huge success. Much like Fulbert of Chartres, Lanfranc taught the arts of the trivium and attracted students from all over Europe, many of whom achieved high positions in the church. Sally Vaughn has shown that, between ca. 1040 and 1160, no fewer than eighty-seven students from Bec went on to become abbots, bishops, and archbishops (as well as a cardinal and a pope). Revenues from the school enabled Bec to acquire numerous properties on both sides of the English Channel.97 Anselm, however, allowed the extern school to wither away so that he could concentrate on teaching monastic novices, who were drawn by his reputation for holiness just as previous students had been drawn by Lanfranc’s learning.98 His lack of interest in secular studies is indicated by some of his letters. Around 1073, when Anselm was prior of Bec, a monk named Avesgot asked him to train his nephew in grammatica for a few months because, he said, “I have more faith in you than in any other living person.” Avesgot went on to ask why Anselm hid his light under a bushel, letting the fame of Lanfranc and Guitmund of Aversa eclipse his own. But Anselm declined, saying he had neither the freedom, nor the desire, nor the opportunity to accept external students as he had once done. As for fame, he replied elliptically that “no other flower emits a fragrance like the rose, even if it deceives by having the same redness.”99 Presumably he meant to express humility: Lanfranc was the true rose and he a mere counterfeit. A few years later we find Anselm writing to his protégé Maurice, one of several monks who had moved from Bec to Canterbury with Lanfranc. Anselm encourages Maurice to attend the lectures of magister Arnulf, who excelled in the study of Virgil and other auctores.

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“You know that teaching the boys grammar has always been a burden to me,” he adds, and “for this reason you made less progress in your knowledge of grammar than you should have.”100 If Anselm did not willingly teach litterae or grammatica, what did he teach? He seems to have specialized in disciplina et mores while tutoring the more advanced monks in theology. Eadmer reports some telling remarks about pedagogy. Using the standard metaphor of sealing wax, Anselm explained why he preferred teaching adolescents to either children or adults. The adult convert, like hardened wax, has a mind already stamped by the imprint of worldly affairs, so he cannot easily receive the new seal of divine teaching, while the child’s mind is like soft wax, still too liquid to retain impressions. The youth, however, is perfectly balanced between extremes, so “if you teach him, you can shape him as you wish.”101 Unlike Goswin, who bemoaned the decline in beatings, Anselm favored kindness. One of Eadmer’s most appealing anecdotes tells of an abbot who came to visit him, lamenting that the boys in his monastery were “incorrigible ruffians” (perversi et incorrigibiles) even though the seniors punished them day and night. “Anselm replied with astonishment: ‘You never give over beating them? And what are they like when they grow up?’ ‘Stupid brutes’ (hebetes et bestiales), he said.” Horrified by this brutality, Anselm offers two similes to show the abbot why his strategy cannot work. If a sapling is shut in on all sides, with no space to spread its branches, it will grow into a gnarled and useless tree. So too the boys, hemmed in on all sides by threats and violence, can produce nothing but hateful thoughts. And yet, Anselm asks, are they not human like yourselves? (Nonne homines, nonne ejusdem sunt naturae cujus vos estis?) Further: “Have you ever seen a goldsmith form his leaves of gold or silver into a beautiful figure with blows alone? I think not. How then does he work? In order to mould his leaf into a suitable form he now presses it and strikes it gently with his tool, and now even more gently raises it with careful pressure and gives it shape. So, if you want your boys to be adorned with good habits, you too, besides the pressure of blows, must apply the encouragement and help of fatherly sympathy and gentleness.”102 Anselm had a favorite student, Osbern, whom he nurtured with just this strategy. Talented but stubborn, the boy had pursued his teacher “with mordant hatred” (more canino)—but Anselm showed forbearance, indulging his pranks and conceding him many pleasures “to delight his youth and to tame his unbridled spirit.” Gradually the boy began to love Anselm and take his advice seriously. The two developed a close, filial friendship even as Anselm became more severe, cracking down on childish behavior and training Osbern in religious

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discipline. Just when he showed every sign of maturing into a perfect monk, however, Anselm’s beloved son became seriously ill. Heartbroken, the prior sat by his sickbed day and night, feeding Osbern with his own hands, “in everything showing himself a true friend.” So intense was his grief that, when it became clear that the youth would die, Anselm extracted the promise of a postmortem visit to reveal his spiritual state—which was duly granted. Despite this reassurance, Anselm said a daily votive mass for Osbern’s soul for a full year after his death.103 He also wrote to his closest friends in Canterbury, begging them to “pray for the late Osbern, my sweetest friend,” just as if he himself had died, because “wherever Osbern is, my soul is his soul.”104 Eadmer concludes that after Osbern died, many of the younger monks competed to take his place in Anselm’s heart. But never again did Anselm have such a favorite. Rather, he strove like the apostle Paul to “become all things to all men” (1 Cor. 9:22).105 Had Osbern lived, he might have become to Anselm what Hildegar was to Fulbert, Walcher to Goswin, or Anselm himself to Lanfranc—the heir apparent, securing his legacy for the future. Death, however, cast a poignant glow of lost love over their bond.106 The erotics of instruction are never so fraught as when a master-student relationship is severed by death, leaving the disciple’s memory evergreen and frozen in time. But Anselm had other students whose diversity reveals what it meant for him to be “all things to all men.” Boso, the intelligent interlocutor of Cur Deus Homo (Why God Became Man), played the same role in real life, helping the master elaborate his ideas and spell out their consequences. He would succeed Anselm as abbot of Bec. Maurice, stranded in Canterbury, continued to write to his old mentor for advice about his studies. (At one point when Maurice was copying medical books for the abbey, Anselm exhorted him to scribal diligence: “I would prefer part of an obscure and unusual work faithfully copied than the whole of it corrupted by mistakes.”)107 Guibert of Nogent, a young monk at the obscure house of Saint-Germerde-Fly, met Anselm almost by accident; his abbey lay on the road from Bec to one of its daughter houses, which the prior often had to visit. In his autobiography, Guibert gives a moving description of Anselm’s kindness and charisma: The person who encouraged me most in [biblical studies] was Anselm, abbot of Bec, who later became archbishop of Canterbury. . . . His teachings were incomparable, and his life perfectly holy. While he was still prior of the aforesaid monastery, he wanted to make my acquaintance, even though I was still a child at the time and lacking the experience of years and intelligence. With great attention

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he set about teaching me how I was to conduct the inner self and how I was to use the laws of reason to govern my little body. . . . He was so determined to make me benefit from his learning, and he pursued this end so persistently, that I might have seemed to be the only reason for his frequent visits.108 Guibert goes on to summarize Anselm’s exegetical practice and teaching on the faculties of the soul, which would shape the younger monk’s first book. Some years later, after Anselm became archbishop, he found an unlikely disciple in Honorius Augustodunensis, an elusive Irish monk who eventually settled in Regensburg. Prolific, fanciful, and devoid of philosophical acumen, the Irishman had a mind at the opposite remove from Anselm’s. Yet, during the years he spent at Canterbury in the early twelfth century, he introduced a number of Anselmian ideas into his immensely successful Elucidarium, keeping them current more effectively than the master’s own, less popular works.109 Unlike secular masters, Anselm never headed a school of his own besides Bec. But, as these examples indicate, he took his students wherever he could find them, never missing an opportunity for instruction. Both Eadmer’s Vita and a widely circulated posthumous work, De similitudinibus, summarize his informal teachings over the dinner table or even on horseback.110 Much like Luther’s table talk, his conversation “left memories which were not easily effaced,” so that, wherever Anselm went, even a brief visit made an indelible impression.111 After being raised against his will to the episcopate, he made it clear that he still saw teaching as his true vocation. Like Augustine, he lived out the topos of nolo episcopari. But the bishop of Hippo used the episcopal throne as a way to expand his teaching mission, whereas Anselm found his much constrained. As often as he could, he still escaped to the serenity of Christ Church, Canterbury, “burying himself in the cloister with the monks and talking to them of . . . their rule of life.” On one such occasion he compared himself to a mother owl, saying that all is well with her when she abides in her hole with her chicks, just as he savors his seclusion with the monks. But when she must fly abroad, the owl is “attacked and torn to pieces” by crows and rooks, just as he is “torn this way and that by the onrush of disputes” and “harassed by secular business, which I hate.”112 Anselm clearly possessed charisma, though of a kind different from any we have encountered thus far. He was not a born leader of men like Augustine, an exemplar of polished elegance like the Victorines, or a dazzling classroom performer like Abelard. Rather, his intellectual gifts coupled with a rare kindness

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and humility made him irresistible. Eadmer stresses that his gentleness earned Anselm the love of all; despite his formidable mind, no one found him intimidating. As prior of Bec, “he was both father and mother to the sick and the sound alike.”113 Much later, when he was exiled from his see because of a dispute with the king, he won favor in Rome “as a mild and gentle man to whom—in his own eyes—nobody owed anything.” Eadmer compares him with Pope Urban II, with whom he traveled, to the latter’s detriment: “The majesty of the pope gave access only to the rich: the humanity of Anselm received all without any acceptance of persons” (Gal. 2:6).114 Ironically, however, that humility nearly poisoned his relationship with the one student who preserved his memory for all time. Eadmer, his biographer, was about twenty when he first met Anselm at Christ Church, Canterbury. Like many others, he felt an immediate attraction, becoming first a disciple and then a constant, trusted companion. During the travels Anselm undertook as archbishop, including his two exiles on the Continent, Eadmer was always at his side, listening—and taking notes. He may initially have meant his biography as a friendly memoir rather than the full-fledged saint’s Life it eventually became, complete with miracles. In 1100, seven years into his episcopate, Anselm finally caught on and asked Eadmer what he was writing. Much to Eadmer’s relief, the archbishop at first agreed to correct the work, approving some parts and altering others. But a few days later, he changed his mind and ordered Eadmer to destroy the manuscript, “for he considered himself far too unworthy for future ages to place the least value on a literary monument to his honour.”115 Eadmer was crestfallen; the Vita had been a labor of decades. Historian that he was, he finally let his concern for posterity outweigh his monastic loyalty: though he indeed destroyed the manuscript, he first made a secret copy. That sin against obedience weighed on his soul for twenty years before he finally confessed it, long after Anselm’s death. Moreover, Anselm may have suspected Eadmer’s disobedience, for from then on he no longer took him into his confidence, leaving the last years of the Vita devoid of lively talk or observation. Southern finds this episode “perhaps the most disturbing incident in Anselm’s life” because “he [Anselm] seems to have gone either too far, or not far enough; to have been severe without being effective; to have spoilt Eadmer’s work, indeed to have seriously injured his life, without achieving the result he aimed at.”116 Anselm’s problem with Eadmer (or Eadmer’s with Anselm) shows why charismatic teaching flourished best in cathedral schools and abbeys with extern schools, like Bec under Lanfranc or Saint-Victor under Hugh and Richard. The teacher is necessarily a public figure; his ability to attract paying students depends on his charisma and visibility. Although Anselm had both, he also had

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a thoroughly monastic humility that sat uneasily with his public life. Half a century later, an even more charismatic monk, Bernard of Clairvaux, called himself the “chimera of [his] age” because he had long since thrown off his monastic lifestyle, though he still wore the habit.117 However guilty he claimed to feel about his unusual vocation, no one had forced Bernard into public life. Anselm, on the other hand, had entered it reluctantly in an act of difficult selfrenunciation. He would much rather have remained hidden in the cloister with his students, like the mother owl with her chicks. Holding as he did that the highest degree of humility is “to love to be treated with contempt,” he could by no means endure Eadmer’s loving tribute, much less the thought of being remembered by posterity as a saint.118 So the Vita Anselmi, grateful as we are to have it, survived at a considerable cost to both its author and its subject.

Critiques of the Charismatic Model Any model of pedagogy based so strongly on affect, centered on the authority and charisma of individual masters, opens itself to some obvious abuses. Even in its heyday, the charismatic model was not without critics. Interestingly, two of them were also among its greatest exponents and beneficiaries—Augustine and Abelard. Both of these towering intellectuals, one living at the start and the other near the end of the model’s ascendancy, had genius enough to learn without teachers the same subjects that others had trouble mastering even with them. That brilliance in turn led each philosopher to rebel against a charming, eloquent, widely admired teacher whom he met in his youth—and then found, despite his reputation, to be ultimately shallow. In the Confessions, Augustine tells how at the age of twenty he came upon Aristotle’s Categories—a work so highly prized that when “scholars mentioned this book, their cheeks would swell with self-importance, so that the title alone was enough to make me stand agape.” Others found the work difficult, even when studying with the most learned masters, but Augustine “managed to read it and understand it without help.” For that matter, he read, understood, and frequently taught every book he could find on the liberal arts. “A student who could follow my instruction without faltering,” he adds, “was reckoned a very fine scholar.” Yet, with the humility that defines the Confessions, he goes on to belittle these achievements. Being still “a slave to sordid ambitions,” he squandered his talents by failing to acknowledge God as their source. He was led even further astray when he came to believe that all existents, including God, could

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be encompassed by Aristotle’s ten categories.119 This is the same rationalist error with which Berengar of Tours would be charged in the eleventh century. Immediately after this confession, but nine years later in time, Augustine recounts his meeting with Faustus, a renowned Manichaean bishop. The young philosopher had faltered in his own Manichaean beliefs because he could not reconcile them with his scientific knowledge of astronomy, but friends repeatedly assured him that Faustus could answer all his questions. When the longawaited Faustus finally arrives, Augustine is as charmed as anyone by his eloquence, his humility and candor, his attractive personality. The two even become friends, after a fashion; Faustus sits in on some of Augustine’s literary classes in Carthage. But Augustine had “heard that he was very well versed in all the higher forms of learning,” a claim that turns out to be false.120 In fact, Faustus knows no science at all; “except for a rudimentary knowledge of literature he had no claims to scholarship.”121 When Augustine proposes collaborating on a set of mathematical problems, Faustus quickly declines, knowing his limitations. Hence Augustine is forced to acknowledge that he has encountered charisma without content, for a man’s eloquence and charm are no substitute for truth. Later he will compare Faustus with a distinguished Catholic bishop, Ambrose of Milan, whom he had initially gone to assess as a professional rhetorician. Eloquent as he was, even Ambrose could not match Faustus for charisma—yet his learning was greater and, “as to content, there could be no comparison.”122 Charisma, then, is a valuable asset for the teacher who happens to possess it. But it must never be mistaken for substance, and a loving teacherstudent relationship can be established without it. The Confessions supplied Peter Abelard with his chief literary model for the Historia calamitatum (Story of His Misfortunes), and we can see its influence nowhere more clearly than in the critique Abelard gives of his own teacher’s shortcomings. He had set out to study theology with Anselm of Laon, who, as he explains, was the leading authority at that time only “ because of his great age” (ex antiquitate). But when he approached “this old man,” Abelard quickly discovered the same flaws that Augustine had seen in Faustus: “Anselm could win the admiration of an audience, but he was useless when put to the question. He had a remarkable command of words but their meaning was worthless and lacked reason” (contemtibilem et ratione uacuum).123 Possessing little of Augustine’s charity or humility, Abelard makes short work of Anselm’s charisma. The old master appears to him like a house full of smoke without light or a leafy tree without fruit.124 Then, reversing the order of Augustine’s exposition, Abelard goes on to boast of his own ability to master difficult texts without teachers.

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Educated men (litterati), he claims, should be perfectly able to understand the church fathers and biblical commentaries without need of further instruction. He proceeds to prove it by lecturing, on one day’s notice, on the most obscure biblical passage his fellow students can choose. Abelard would go on to become a famously charismatic teacher himself. But, fittingly enough, an uppity student once gave him a taste of his own medicine. The little-known Vita Goswini tells how its hero, later abbot of Anchin, challenged the master in the middle of a lecture just as Abelard had once challenged Anselm of Laon. Furious, Abelard responded with his usual belligerence: “See that you shut up, and beware not to disturb my lecture!”125 According to Goswin’s biographer (naturally), the youth emerged victorious. The incident shows how easily oedipal rivalry could replace the old posture of adoring praise once the principle of charismatic authority had been breached. We can see the clash between Anselm and Abelard as a paradigm shift between the old and the new learning: it sets the charismatic model of loving imitation against the scholastic ethos of reasoned debate.126 In a poem addressed to his son Astralabe, Abelard repeats his metaphor contrasting mere verbal foliage with the fruit of truth. He insists that no eloquence, authority, or admiring love can take the place of rational proof: Care not who speaks, but what is said; Fine words make their author’s name. Do not swear on the words of a beloved master, Nor let a teacher hold you with his love. We are nourished by the fruit, not the leaves, And meaning must be preferred to words.127 The erotics of instruction, according to such critics, could produce not only unwholesome personality cults but a whole culture long on mutual admiration and short on intellectual substance. Independent minds could be stifled by it. Augustine had once told a student, “Do not rely too much on authority, especially mine (which is nothing)—but as Horace says, dare to be wise.”128 Refusing to be cowed by authority or the deference it demanded, Abelard and other exponents of the new learning similarly preferred the “fruit” of dialectic to the “mere words” of grammar and rhetoric, choosing to hash out substantive positions by debate rather than imitation of an elegant style. “If classroom communities are built on imitation,” a contemporary educational theorist observes, “there seems to be little room for creativity, criticality, novelty, or difference in any form.”129

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The intensely personal nature of the old learning also made it vulnerable to personal abuse. We have already encountered Guibert of Nogent’s autobiography, written shortly before Abelard’s. In it Guibert tells the harrowing tale of his relationship with a tutor hired by his mother. Rather than sending her young son to a cathedral school, the widow found a private grammaticus to teach him. The abbot recalls that in his childhood in the 1060s, unlike “the present day” (ca. 1115), learned teachers were rare—and this man was not one of them. Knowing little Latin and no rhetoric or poetics, he compensated for his ignorance of litterae by concentrating on mores: “Everything pertaining to modesty, chastity, and good manners he taught me with consummate loyalty and affection.”130 But he was also harsh and brutal, allowing the boy no holidays or normal childhood play and relying heavily on beatings to hide his lack of pedagogical skill. Despite this brutality, Guibert nevertheless took a shine to the tutor: “I had such a liking for him—striped as my poor little skin might have been by his many whiplashes—that I obeyed him, not out of fear . . . but out of some curious feeling of love, which overwhelmed my whole being and made me forget all his harshness.”131 As a mature man, Guibert could not explain his love for this teacher (nescio quo medullitus insito amore). Without succumbing to the temptation to psychoanalyze him, we can recall that he was orphaned of his father in infancy, while his tutor, who dispensed affection and floggings in equal measure, had complete control over the boy’s every move.132 In a culture that invested masters with such a sacral aura, any teacher— charismatic or not, competent or not—must have reaped some benefits from the system. Fortunately for Guibert, his love of learning would be rekindled by St. Anselm, who as we have seen rejected harsh punishment. Another kind of abuse is reported by John of Salisbury. Like Guibert, John had been entrusted to a tutor in childhood to learn elementary Latin. This man, a priest, was addicted to the art of divination, and it was well known that innocent boys were best suited to crystal gazing. As John recalls, his teacher made him and another boy sit at his feet while he performed some “preliminary magical rites,” then invoked the names of demons and anointed the boys’ fingernails with chrism to make them shine. Alternatively, he might use the polished surface of a basin. The boys were to gaze on these surfaces in the hope that images revealing the future would appear. John’s companion did see “certain misty figures,” but luckily for him he saw nothing—and was therefore subjected to no further necromantic rites.133 This was a real and terrifying abuse. It filled John with horror, which deepened as he grew older and “made the acquaintance of many practitioners of the art.” All of them ultimately went blind, he asserts,

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except for two (including his old tutor), who repented and entered religious orders. As Richard Kieckhefer has shown, magic was widely practiced within a shadowy “clerical underworld” that included monks, friars, and regular canons.134 Then as now, priests had easy access to boys. If necromancy held such terror for John, who was dismissed after only one or two sessions of unsuccessful scrying, how much more must it have frightened boys like his companion, who succeeded? Lured into the practice by a trusted authority figure, perhaps made to feel special and privileged, these boys likely grew up to fear that they had been in real contact with demons, to the peril of their immortal souls. The corruption of children by this art, much like clerical sex abuse today, might be one reason magicians and necromancers were so deeply hated. As for sex abuse itself, we cannot help but wonder how often the cult of the charismatic master enabled or concealed it. Münster-Swendsen acknowledges that “the love of masters might go over the limit and become a barrier to the student’s intellectual advancement, or in the worst-case scenario, turn into a sexual affair.”135 Jaeger too admits that “some no doubt took advantage of [their] dominance to ravish their students.”136 Much more forcefully, Dyan Elliott argues that pederasty was rife in medieval schools, although few actual cases are known because an aversion to scandal—and to naming “the sin not fit to be named”— produced a culture of cover-ups.137 Human nature being what it is, it seems unlikely that such abuse was rare in these volatile same-sex environments. British boarding schools, especially in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, have been notorious for pederasty and sexual abuse.138 Closer to home, a 2013 article in the New Yorker, entitled “The Master,” had as its subtitle, “A charismatic teacher enthralled his students. Was he abusing them?”139 The answer is, alas, yes. As further investigations revealed, as many as sixty-four students at the elite Horace Mann School in the Bronx were abused over a period of about thirty years by twenty-two faculty and staff, who not only protected but pimped for one another.140 For the Middle Ages we have no judicial records of that kind, no investigative reporting. If a boy had in fact been abused by a master, whom could he tell, or who would believe him? His best revenge might have been to remain silent, for if the students of the master declined to celebrate his legacy and promote his lineage, he would be condemned to oblivion—the damnatio memoriae of history—so that neither his virtues nor his vices would be known to us today.141 One cleric did speak out against abusers, although his vitriol against women and “sodomites” has earned him a bad name. In his Liber Gomorrhianus (1049), a treatise much discussed in recent years, Peter Damian denounced priests who abused their spiritual sons, claiming that their “unheard-of crime” compounded

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sodomy with sacrilege and incest.142 If a bishop had sexual relations with a priest he had ordained, or if a sodomite heard the confession of his partner, he was not only unchaste but incestuous because the sacraments created spiritual kinship. The abuse of boys is even worse than bestiality, Damian declared, because a beast at least lacks an immortal soul.143 He even made an unsuccessful attempt to persuade Pope Leo IX to defrock all priests who committed sodomy in any form (including masturbation).144 To justify his proposal, Damian tried to revive a seventh-century canon of shocking harshness: A cleric or monk who seduces youths or young boys or is found kissing or in any other impure situations is to be publicly flogged and lose his tonsure. When his hair has been shorn, his face is to be foully besmeared with spit and he is to be bound in iron chains. For six months he will languish in prison-like confinement and on three days of each week shall fast on barley bread in the evening. After this he will spend another six months under the custodial care of a spiritual elder, remaining in a segregated cell, giving himself to manual work and prayer, . . . and he shall never again associate with youths in private conversation nor in counselling them.145 Peter the Venerable, abbot of Cluny, tells the tale of a monk who overheard two demons boasting of their exploits. After goading a knight to commit adultery, they stopped at a monastery and “made the schoolmaster fornicate with one of the boys.”146 Peter had previously served as prior at the Cluniac abbey of Vézelay, where fears about clerical pederasty take visual form in the Ganymede capital (ca. 1120–32). Positioned in the southeast corner of the nave, near the entrances to both the oblates’ and the monks’ choirs, this capital depicts the abduction of Ganymede by Jupiter in the guise of an eagle (Fig. 2). The boy is upside down, his sleeve caught in the eagle’s beak, so that we see only his arms and his terrified face. To the left, a helpless parent or guardian looks on in horror, while an enormous demon leers at the right. As the art historian Ilene Forsyth has argued, the sculpture probably represents a public condemnation of pederasty and a solemn warning to the monks.147 Literary evidence suggests one form that sexual abuse might have taken, though it is important not to overread poems as if they were witnesses to acts. In the eleventh- and twelfth-century revival of Ovidian poetry, two names stand out from a largely anonymous crowd: Marbod of Rennes (ca. 1035–1123) and Baudri of Bourgueil (1046–1130). Marbod headed the cathedral school at Angers for

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Figure 2 The abduction of Ganymede. Capital from the basilica of SainteMarie-Madeleine, Vézelay, ca. 1120–32. Photo: University of Pittsburgh, ULS Digital Collections.

thirty years, from about 1067 to 1097. His student Baudri, having become a monk, served from about 1079 through 1107 as abbot of Bourgueil in the Loire Valley, where he too had a teaching role. Both wrote interesting and accomplished bodies of Latin verse, including erotica.148 When they were elevated to bishoprics in their sixties, both men suppressed their love poems, so these did not circulate widely. But the light they cast on the poets’ teaching careers is very different from the panegyrics and hagiographic Vitae we have seen. Marbod and Baudri taught grammatica, or Latin literature, which included composition in prose and verse—and a newly popular poet for imitation was Ovid. In fact, the exchange of amorous poems and letters between teacher and student was a recognized pedagogical technique; a teacher would correct the student’s productions and offer his own to stimulate responses in kind.149 Two rare survivals even re-

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veal such exchanges between male teachers and female students.150 During a relatively brief period in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries, elite girls were admitted to this charmed circle of Latin learning and charismatic teaching.151 Marbod and Baudri may also have taught a few girls, but they taught primarily boys, so it is to boys that most of their erotic poems are addressed. In a pioneering study of these lyrics, Thomas Stehling argued that they exalt a standard of youthful beauty, largely the same for both sexes—“a luminous, delicate beauty that prevails across sex lines” yet, in effect, “makes male beauty a category of female beauty.”152 The ideal love object is a fair, pretty, androgynous boy whose voice is still sweet and girlish. Unlike the beloved girl or woman, however, the beloved boy is portrayed more sensuously. Not only his face but his body too are described, and his personality vividly evoked. Most important, this beautiful boy is often characterized by “ill-mannered aloofness”: he is distant, haughty, and annoyingly chaste.153 For instance, Marbod writes of one boy: Rough and ungrateful, like a tiger cub, He only laughed at the gentlest words of suitors, Laughed at attentions doomed to have no effect, And laughed at a sighing lover’s tears.154 The title of this poem marks it as a satire composed sub assumpta persona, so Marbod is not speaking in his own voice. Nevertheless, this convention of the lovely but unwilling boy is ubiquitous. In the famous song “O admirabile Veneris idolum,” the speaker begs the sea and the Fates to protect a boy he loves, even as the boy flees from him: Of hard matter, from the bones of Mother Earth, men were created when the stones were cast. Among these is this dear little boy, who pays no heed to my tearful moans.155 The lyricism of such homoerotic songs has been celebrated since the 1980s, when they were first rediscovered and introduced to the public.156 But meaning depends on context. If we read them in light of the erotics of instruction—as love lyrics addressed by teachers to the boys they taught—then the boy’s “ill-mannered aloofness” takes a different tone. It is like the saucy refusal of a shepherdess in a pastourelle. From a seducer’s perspective, she only heightens her allure by playing hard to get, but from her own point of view, she is firmly resisting rape.157 So too

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with the boy. The existence of such lyrics hardly proves that Baudri, Marbod, or any other poet was a seducer in fact. No love lyric, least of all a medieval one, can be reduced to the poet’s personal experience—and, as noted, in Latin pedagogy such lyrics could be exchanged for composition practice. But the poems do insistently speak in a pedophile’s voice. Like any love poem, they express a lyric lover’s desires, advances, and regrets, while the flight or mocking laughter of the boy voices his refusal to be seduced. The cultivation of this genre demonstrates, at the very least, that the seduction of boys by their teachers was a thinkable practice. As Tina Chronopoulos shows, certain medieval commentaries reveal a keen pedagogical awareness of the danger.158 What we cannot know is how often abuse actually occurred.

The Text as Immortal Teacher One set of teachers, though, could be trusted without reserve. In his Philobiblon (1344), the English bishop and collector Richard de Bury sings their praise: In books, beyond any doubt, you [Wisdom] have set your tabernacle. . . . In books the cherubim spread their wings, that the student’s intellect may ascend and gaze from pole to pole, from the rising of the sun to its setting. . . . All things are corrupted and decay over time, and Saturn ceases not to devour the children he begets; all the glory of the world would be buried in oblivion unless God had provided mortals with the remedy of books. . . . As long as a book survives, its author remains immortal and cannot die. . . . Books are teachers who instruct us without rods or switches, without words of anger, without gifts of clothing or money. If you draw near, they are not asleep; if you inquire of them, they do not hide; they will not complain if you err nor laugh if you are ignorant. O books, alone generous and free (O libri soli liberales et liberi)! You give to everyone who asks and set free all who serve you with diligence.159 Richard de Bury managed to acquire one of the greatest private collections in Europe, at the price of dying in great poverty. But unlike many of his kind (the opulent Jean, Duke of Berry, comes to mind), he did not collect his books as art objects, investments, or status symbols. The true lover of books will not merely hoard them but memorize them, de Bury writes, for “above all, it is fit-

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ting to eat the volume with Ezekiel [Ezek. 3:1–3], so that the belly of the memory may become sweet within.” Eating, as so often in medieval texts, is a metaphor for memorial work. When books are thus properly used, they reveal their true power: although they may physically reside in Paris or Athens, at the same time their words resound in Britain or Rome. “Indeed, even as they rest, they are moved; while remaining in their places, they are borne about everywhere in the minds of their hearers.”160 Books indeed are teachers, but, like living teachers, their wisdom is of little use until the student has internalized it, “learning by heart” in the fullest sense. The process of assimilating texts into memory was understood as an intellectual act, yet it was grounded in a quasi-physical absorption. Like one of the clean animals of Scripture, such as a cow chewing its cud (Lev. 11:3), a meditator “ruminated” on the text’s wisdom and so absorbed it into the belly of his mind, making it thoroughly part of himself. This was not the mindless learning now denigrated as “rote memorization” but an absorption enabled only by intense, energized, focused attention.161 By this process the student was inwardly shaped and formed, much as if he were imitating a living master. Mary Carruthers writes that “the student of the text, having digested it by reexperiencing it in memory, has become not its interpreter, but its new author, or re-author.”162 In this way litterae themselves could teach mores. As Quintilian, an authority on rhetoric, explained, “memory of this kind lasts into old age and, impressed on a raw mind, profits for the development of character.”163 Medieval theorists understood memory as a creative faculty, the indispensable foundation of thought. If the soft wax of the mind was active in its selfconscious receptivity, the seal-matrix of the text could be even more so. The wisdom of a dead author could still exercise a powerful agency through living words on the page, and for this reason the choice of auctores for study was critical. This, of course, was the teacher’s work—or rather, that of the culture at large, for the high medieval curriculum was largely, if never fully, standardized through such tools as florilegia and accessus ad auctores. Thus the formation of memory through education was highly intentional, a form of deliberate selffashioning within a community that was understood to include the living, the dead and, in principle, those yet unborn. By reading out loud (lectio) and learning by heart (meditatio), the monk or schoolboy could internalize both sacred and classical authors—the Psalmist, the evangelists, St. Benedict, Cassian, Virgil, Cato—in such a way that they remained inwardly alive and active, exercising a durable agency within the mind. For this reason, reading as such—not the mere content of books—was conceived as an ethical activity par excellence. That is why many texts that would

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strike a modern reader as amoral or even immoral, written for pure entertainment, are classified in medieval schemes of learning as “ethical.” In a standard introductory format for textbooks, based on Boethius, each work is classified according to six headings: title, author, intention, utility, order of the work, and the part of philosophy under which it falls.164 The “part of philosophy” (or discipline, as we would say) turns out more often than not to be ethics. Ever since the late antique commentator Fulgentius, the Aeneid had been taken as a moral allegory of human life, or indeed of education itself.165 Even the problematic Ovid could be read as a moralist, as demonstrated by a collection of accessus ad auctores compiled at Tegernsee around 1150. Two introductions classify the Heroïdes—fictional love letters from seduced and abandoned women to their paramours—as belonging to the domain of ethics because the writer meant “to reproach men and women held captive by foolish and illicit love,” or else to “commend lawful marriage and love.” Ovid himself could by such means be saved—and savored—by Christians as “an instructor of good manners and an eradicator of bad.”166 A third, more sophisticated commentary mentions that Ovid might have written to give pleasure and to demonstrate the art of epistolary wooing. But he could also have wanted to “urge the pursuit of virtues and to prove vices wrong” in repentance for his earlier crime—teaching illicit love. “Hence he wrote a book for [married women], giving them this example so they would know what things to imitate in loving and what to avoid.”167 It is easy to parody this kind of reading, which after all culminated in the fourteenth-century Ovide moralisé. In that outrageous work, moralizing allegory goes so far as to make Myrrha, mad with incestuous love for her father, into a figure of the Virgin Mary, who loved God her Father so deeply that such fine amour was never seen.168 But such excesses, perhaps written with tongue in cheek, are only extreme versions of a standard pedagogical technique. The grammar classroom could not do without Ovid as a master of Latin style, a model for composition practice, and a repertory of classical myth. Since reading inevitably formed character, these interventions show the masters, who were surely not naïve, doing their best to assure that the pliable wax in their hands was stamped with a wholesome imprint, not a pernicious one. Charismatic pedagogy would have a long, lingering afterlife, but its heyday had passed by 1200, with the rise of universities and their utterly different culture of disputation. As we have seen, even eleventh-century masters like Guitmund of Aversa and Goswin of Mainz already lamented its waning—not to mention Bernard of Clairvaux in his attacks upon Abelard. Our finest interpreter of the old learning, Stephen Jaeger, makes a provocative case that the char-

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ismatic culture of the cathedral schools was succeeded by a different kind of charisma, less personal than aesthetic. Just as the charismatic presence of Socrates and Jesus yielded to the “charismatic art” of the Platonic dialogues and the Gospels, so the ephemeral panegyrics, elegies, and effusive letters produced in the old schools gave way to new art forms that were more enduring and ambitious, such as the romance and the idealized figures of Gothic sculpture. “The death of the charismatic figure generates the need to recapture and hold firm his image. It is passed along through those nearest the master, who become, as it were, living contact relics. Then that force too fades. Finally writing and effigies become the transmitters. Charismatic representation emerges when the sensed force of living presence weakens.”169 Perhaps; it is an intriguing theory. Instead of a Fulbert, a Lancelot; instead of Anselm and Bernard, the sculptures of Chartres. Yet one could argue that in the thirteenth century, charismatic presence did not disappear at all but simply changed its locale—moving from the cathedral school to the hermitage, the beguinage, and the city streets, with the rise of a new kind of miracle-working saint. That form of charisma is the subject of Chapter 2.

Coda: On the Persistence of Charismatic Teaching The ideals explored in this chapter differ so radically from modern educational thought that some readers might cringe, perceiving such schools as more cultlike than liberating. Some medieval writers, as we have seen, felt the same way. But it is worth remembering that these teachers set out to train the whole person, not just the intellect. To that end, their pedagogy can be better understood in the light of cross-cultural wisdom traditions than of medieval (much less modern) universities. An ancient Chinese text, for example, tells us that the master “always appears in the proper attire, knows the right way to enter a room, utters the most apropos words, and deals with others in the most tactful manner, yet is never stiff or formal. His behavior seems to flow spontaneously from his very nature, which completely disarms philosophical opponents, tames ornery rulers, and shames lazy disciples into pursuing their studies with renewed effort. . . . The truly virtuous . . . ruler can simply take his place in the palace and the gravitational force of his [charisma] will draw everyone into his or her proper place around him.”170 The master in question is Confucius, and the text summarized is the Ana­ lects, compiled by his disciples. The word translated as “charisma” (de) can also mean “virtue.” De flows from wu­wei, a state of effortless spontaneity and supreme competence obtained only through long training.171 Much like the program of

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Saint-Victor and the cathedral schools, this regimen entails cultivation of the body, elegant manners, immersion in classical texts, imitation of the teacher, and mastery of complex rituals. Like those institutions, too, the Confucians’ educational regime was developed for the aristocracy. It was grounded in religion yet intended for the formation of rulers and secular bureaucrats. Confucian thought had little influence outside China, but another Asian wisdom tradition is better known in the West and can help us understand the point of teacher imitation. Yoga, in its myriad forms, is a compound of Hindu philosophy, meditation techniques, and rigorous physical cultivation. Even Westerners who practice it as a form of exercise hope to gain some degree of inner peace or mindfulness—an ability to focus on tasks with clarity, without the distractions we usually bring to our daily work. A yoga teacher must be able to demonstrate the postures with grace and effortless ease (something like wu­ wei). If she cannot, students will learn little from mere verbal instructions. Conversely, even harried, suspicious Westerners may find themselves taking the skilled yogi or yogini as a role model, not only for the physical postures, but also for the serenity and ease they wish to gain as a benefit. In short, we are more willing to countenance the imitation, even adulation, of teachers when the acquisition of physical skills is at stake, whether in music or dance, cooking, yoga, athletics, or martial arts. On the other end of the spectrum, committed religious practitioners such as Christian and Buddhist monastics still see a need for discipleship to holy men and women who embody the spiritual goals they seek. If we acknowledge a regimen like that of Saint-Victor as combining both aspects of disciplina, cultivating the body and perfecting the spirit, we can better appreciate a pedagogy so strongly committed to imitation. But to understand why imitation was so important, we must return to the medieval religious context. For the goal of charismatic pedagogy was cultivation of the student’s inner self, even if one of its most important methods was the assiduous training of the body. More subtly, the student was intended to model his inner self on the teacher’s—consciously through imitation but also, and more powerfully, through the subliminal effects of love, proximity, and the radiance of the master’s charisma. It is with good reason that educational theorists constantly returned to the ancient image of a seal that stamps its impression on wax. Brigitte Bedos-Rezak gave her book on the cultural meaning of seals the arresting title When Ego Was Imago.172 While the medieval ego was imago in many ways, one in particular is relevant here: no one ever set out to become a “unique individual” but sought rather to perfect the imago Dei that formed the essence of human personhood. This reminder harks back to an old

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debate in medieval studies. In response to Colin Morris’s persuasive claim that the twelfth century “discovered the individual,” Caroline Bynum showed that, despite all the memorable personalities we meet in this era, the process of selfformation remained inseparable from membership in communities, based on the imitation of illustrious models.173 The invisible God could be known through Christ, God’s visible image (Col. 1:15), and Christ could in turn be known through the saints. But one had to begin on earth. On an everyday level, the magister was supposed to be a person who had perfected his own character through disciplina and cultus virtu­ tum before presuming to teach, and his charisma was the outward sign of that perfection. “In the context of cathedral school learning, the teacher [was] the bearer and conveyor of real presence,” the exemplar of divine presence in the living flesh.174 As one of St. Bernard’s admirers wrote, “You need only look on him, and you are instructed; you need only hear the sound of his voice, and you learn; you need only follow him, and you are made perfect.”175 If pressed, almost any of the teachers profiled in this chapter could have said with St. Paul, “Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ” (1 Cor. 11:1). For the process of imitation to be effective, a deep and prolonged relationship was essential. Although a boy could be sent to school as early as seven, there was no standard length to the course of studies. Hildegar was confided to Fulbert’s instruction from childhood, as Walcher of Liège was to Goswin’s. But Guibert of Nogent had reached his teens by the time he met Anselm, and Eadmer was about twenty. Godfrey did not begin to study with Richard of SaintVictor until he was almost thirty, yet he describes his training at the abbey as a rebirth, a complete self-transformation. A master-student relationship might make up in intensity what it lacked in duration, but all the theorists insist that it must be a relationship of love. William of Conches and John of Salisbury both emphasize that teachers should be loved and honored like parents, if not more, and William states explicitly that love will motivate the imitation essential to learning. Adam of Perseigne too recommends a “worthy intimacy” between the novice and his master, for love alone can make his discipleship fruitful. Augustine, at the outset of this long tradition, had urged that a teacher should draw near his students “with a brother’s love, or a father’s or a mother’s,” to the point of full coinherence: “Each of us comes to dwell in the other, and so they as it were speak in us what they hear, while we in some way learn in them what we teach.” The intense bonds between a master and his students naturally led to the cultivation of lineage, a practice we find in the wisdom traditions of both East

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and West. Yoga, like most branches of Buddhism, is transmitted by sacred lineages that guarantee the authenticity of the teaching through an unbroken chain of masters and disciples, not unlike the Catholic idea of apostolic succession and the Islamic transmission of hadith, or authentic traditions about the Prophet. If high medieval magistri never attained quite such impressive chains of transmission, they did care a great deal about their lineage. One could easily compile a volume of medieval letters of recommendation, which would be instructive, for the Old Boy network precedes the foundation of the university itself. Cathedral schools and abbeys were demonstrably central to the making of careers. Adelmann of Liège rejoiced in the wide ecclesiastical diffusion of Fulbert’s protégés, while Lanfranc’s teaching at Bec and Caen produced a spate of admiring biographies.176 These lineages are very different from the intellectual genealogies that could be crafted for the later Middle Ages, for example tracing the dissemination of ideas by the students of Thomas Aquinas. For it was not the reproduction of ideas or texts but the formation of persons that charismatic pedagogy fostered. Cathedral schools had as yet no standard exams, no academic degrees, and no rites of passage, such as writing a Sentences commentary. In fact, most shocking to modern sensibilities, they had no measurable outcomes at all. In an age as obsessed as ours with quantifiable results, that may be one of their most attractive features.

Chapter 2

Saint and Sinner Reading Minds

And when Jesus had seen their thoughts, he said, “Why do you think evil in your hearts?” —Matthew 9:4 I would not await your request if I in-you’d myself as you in-me yourself; that is, if I were in you as you are in me; that is, if I knew what you wished as you know and see in me what I wish; or if I knew your inner thoughts as you know mine. —Johannes de Serravalle, paraphrase of Dante, Paradiso 9 (1417)

In a fascinating study of American evangelicals, When God Talks Back, anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann suggests that Christian prayer entails a theory of mind radically different from that of society at large. By “theory of mind,” she means not epistemology as philosophers understand it but simply the commonsense assumptions we form about other people from childhood on. “To become a committed Christian,” Luhrmann argues, “one must learn to override three basic features of human psychology: that minds are private, that persons are visible, and that love is conditional and contingent upon right behavior.”1 New converts to the faith must learn (with difficulty) to experience the invisible God as a person and to discern his voice and intentions within the swirling chaos of their own thoughts. Moving beyond that level of attainment, experienced prayer specialists can even learn to intervene in the minds of others. In communion with the divine Mind, the universal matrix, they develop a capacity not

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only to read other minds but also to transmit inspiring or empowering thoughts, images, and energies, with or without the medium of words. Medieval saints’ Lives, with their vigorous commitment to the miraculous, reveal the same convictions and many of the same practices that Luhrmann outlines.2 For God and those who dwell “in God,” minds are not always private, nor must persons be visible. In fact, the prayer of intercession, avidly sought and offered, could become a means of direct intervention into other minds. In this chapter I examine the practice of mind reading or spiritual clairvoyance, the ability of one person to discern the hidden thoughts of another, which emerges as a major hagiographic theme in the thirteenth century. Miraculous mind reading was conceived as a by-product of the life of prayer. On the model of Jesus, who could read the thoughts of his interlocutors, saints come to be credited with supernatural insight into other minds through telepathy and clairvoyance. They can discern unconfessed sins and secret temptations, as well as hidden graces concealed out of modesty. Understood as an aspect of prophecy, saintly mind reading can overlap with intercessory prayer, exorcism, empathetic friendship, ecstatic visions, and predictions about the future. In the last chapter we looked at the formation of minds; here we will consider their reformation through the intimidating, if usually benign, gaze of the mind-reading saint. The gaze was not always benign, however—for what saints could do through the power of God, demoniacs could do through their master, the devil. Hence miraculous mind reading had its dark side: demonic mind reading. In some communities, possessed persons even enjoyed celebrity status, pressed into forensic ser vice to solve such crimes as adultery and theft. If we can believe the purveyors of pious exempla, a fear of these demonic mind readers sometimes induced sinners to confess because, once they had done so, the slate was wiped clean. After confession the devil (and thus the demoniac) could no longer remember their sins.3 Invaluable to confessors, the gift of reading consciences has long been ascribed to saintly priests, beginning in the late Middle Ages and culminating in such modern figures as the Curé d’Ars and Padre Pio. More often, though, such miraculous mind reading is reported of holy women and lay brothers who did unofficial pastoral counseling but had no power to absolve. This hagiographic motif points to a well-known gap between institutional and charismatic authority, though the latter is not restricted to women or even low-status men.4 Rather, the divide is clerical ordination. While the confessor forgives sins in persona Christi, the saintly woman, monk, or lay brother reads minds in the mind of God, entering the troubled conscience with the help of the Holy Spirit. Soon after annual confession to a priest became mandatory in 1215, the ancient

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theme of miraculous mind reading gained new prominence in saints’ Lives as a form of resistance to routinized obedience. Its awesome authority provided a hedge against the reduction of confession to a purely formal, spiritually meaningless requirement This charism is not limited to earthly life, however, or to the revelation of sins. In the patristic era, such authorities as Augustine and Gregory the Great had speculated about telepathy as a feature of heavenly bliss. The saints, too remote to hear earthly speech, needed the power to read their devotees’ minds in order to intercede for them. More broadly, human relations in paradise would no longer be darkened by sin, so the joy of all would be multiplied if they had free access to each other’s minds. The most thorough and thoughtful exponent of this view is none other than Dante. In the Paradiso, he ascribes complete mental transparency—a mutual, universal reading of minds in the mind of God—to all the blessed. Not only can they read the pilgrim’s mind, they all know one another’s thoughts because of their mutual coinherence in the divine mind. This transparency is so central to Dante’s imagining of heaven that he coins a whole series of verbs, all beginning with the prefix “in,” to emphasize telepathy and indwelling as aspects of the celestial life. In this way the ministry practiced by a few select saints on earth opens onto a wider vision of divine coinherence, in which no minds are private because no one has anything to hide.

Jesus the Mind Reader Saintly telepathy is rooted in the Gospels, for all four evangelists consistently portray Jesus as a mind reader. This ability is especially clear in his encounters with opponents. Just as in the later saints’ Lives, the capacity of Jesus to read minds often turns on the hidden sins and skeptical thoughts of his detractors. For instance, when devotees bring a paralytic to be healed, he first tells the disabled man that his sins are forgiven. The attending scribes take this for blasphemy: only God has the power to forgive sins, so Jesus’s declaration makes an implicit claim to divinity. Luke’s version of the miracle states only that the scribes and Pharisees question Jesus’s action, allowing for the possibility of vocal objections (Luke 5:21). But Matthew and Mark say explicitly that Jesus “knew their thoughts” (Matt. 9:4) or “perceiv[ed] in his spirit that they thus questioned within themselves” (Mark 2:8). Similarly, when Jesus casts out demons, the Pharisees mutter that he does this in collusion with the prince of demons. Once again Jesus “knew their thoughts” (Matt. 12:25, Luke 11:17).

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Another of his controversial practices is healing on the Sabbath. As the scribes and Pharisees lie in watch one day to see if he will do so, again “he [knows] their thoughts” (Luke 6:8) and deliberately provokes them, healing a man who has a withered hand. On another occasion, Jesus is having dinner at a Pharisee’s house when a “woman of the city, who was a sinner” (identified in the Middle Ages as Mary Magdalene), washes his feet with her tears, dries them with her hair, and anoints them with expensive ointment. The Pharisee mentally condemns Jesus, concluding that he cannot be a prophet because, if he were, he would have known that this woman was a sinner and unclean. Jesus, however, reads the thoughts of both the judgmental Pharisee and the penitent woman (Luke 7:37–50), instructing the one and forgiving the other. At the Temple in Jerusalem, he sees a poor widow donating two small coins to the treasury and knows without being told that, unlike the many rich donors, she has given all she has (Mark 12:43–44, Luke 21:3–4). At the very least, these anecdotes were meant to show first-century readers that Jesus was a prophet. On a later, fully Christian reading, they demonstrate his omniscience. Like God, or indeed as God, he knows all and sees all. His healing ability is also linked with mind reading. Jesus often tells people that their “faith” has saved them or made them whole. Examples include a woman with a hemorrhage (Matt. 9:22, Mark 5:34), a Samaritan leper (Luke 17:19), and a blind beggar named Bartimaeus (Mark 10:52, Luke 18:42). Conversely, when Jesus perceives a lack of faith among the people he cannot do “many mighty works” (Matt. 13:58). While he implicitly knows whether or not a person has faith, healings seem occasionally to take place even without his conscious volition. In the case of the bleeding woman, who presses against him in a large crowd, he perceives that “power has gone forth from him” (Mark 5:30, Luke 8:46) and asks who touched him, before explicitly telling the woman that her faith has healed her. In these stories, believing in Jesus establishes coinherence with him. He perceives the sick person’s faith and transforms it, by his mercy, into healing power. John’s narratives differ in style and substance from the Synoptic Gospels, but John too depicts Jesus as a capable mind reader. This in fact is a key principle of his Christology: “He knew all men and needed no one to bear witness of man; for he himself knew what was in man” (John 2:25). Jesus often displays this ability by revealing a deep inner knowledge of someone he has barely met. When he first encounters Simon, Jesus merely “look[s] at him” and immediately renames him Cephas or Peter (John 1:42). That name, meaning “rock,” is a pun in both Greek and Latin (Petrus/petra): “You are Peter, and on this rock I will

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build my church” (Matt. 16:18). Similarly, when Jesus sees a man named Nathaniel sitting under a fig tree, he salutes him as “an Israelite indeed, in whom is no guile” (John 1:47). Nathaniel is so amazed that he at once hails Jesus as “the Son of God” and “the King of Israel” (John 1:49). Soon afterward, Christ meets a Samaritan woman drawing water at a well. Without being told, he knows that she has had five husbands and currently cohabits with a man she has not married (John 4:18). Despite this irregular past, he treats the woman with respect and even reveals to her that he is the Messiah. Finally, after the apostle Thomas has missed an encounter with the risen Jesus, he tells the other ten that he will not believe unless he can “place [his] finger in the mark of the nails, and place [his] hand in his side” (John 20:25). A week later, Jesus appears again and, knowing Thomas’s doubt, invites him to do precisely that (John 20:27). For John, the capacity of Jesus to read minds is a clear sign of his divine sonship, leading others to confess their faith in him. This quality is also linked with predestination: he knows the hearts of those he has chosen for apostolic callings even before they can prove their abilities in action. By contrast, the Synoptics do not directly present the telepathy of Jesus as miraculous. It is not among the dramatic “signs and wonders” that include healings, exorcisms, stilling a storm, and walking on water. So it is at least possible to believe that Jesus possesses this ability through his natural shrewdness, empathy, and insight into the human soul. More likely, however, the reader is meant to infer that Jesus can read minds because of his communion with God. This is much plainer in episodes where his prophetic abilities extend to foretelling the future. For instance, Jesus tells Peter that the next fish he catches will have a shekel in its mouth, which he can use to pay the Temple tax (Matt. 17:27). He repeatedly predicts his Passion, knowing in advance that Judas will betray him (Matt. 26:21–25, John 13:26) and Peter will deny him—as recorded in all four gospels (Matt. 26:34, Mark 14:30, Luke 22:34, John 13:38). He also predicts the coming destruction of the Temple (Matt. 24:2, Mark 13:2, Luke 19:43–44). Jesus never directly promises that his disciples will share in his mindreading power. But in John 14:12 he makes the astonishing statement, “He who believes in me will also do the works that I do; and greater works than these will he do.” In fact, the Acts of the Apostles reveals one alarming instance of apostolic mind reading. Ananias and Sapphira, a Christian couple, sell a plot of land and give (most of) the proceeds to the nascent church, while secretly holding back a portion for themselves. Peter, miraculously discerning that they have “lie[d] to the Holy Spirit,” confronts husband and wife separately with their false pretense—causing each of them to drop dead on the spot (Acts 5:1–11).

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More benignly, a different Ananias is commissioned by God to release the newly converted Paul from his temporary blindness. Thanks to information revealed to him in a vision, Ananias is aware before meeting Paul of his dramatic experience on the Damascus road and knows him to be a changed man (Acts 9:10–19). Thus, while apostolic mind reading is not a major theme in the New Testament, there are a few hints that, through divine revelation, the followers of Jesus may come to share in his remarkable ability to read the hearts and minds of their fellows. This theme is magnified in early hagiography, playing an especially significant roles in the Lives of St.  Pachomius and other desert fathers.5 But it achieves its greatest prominence in thirteenth-century Vitae and exempla collections. Miracles of this type abound in saints’ Lives from the southern Low Countries, especially the diocese of Liège, with its network of fervent monks, nuns, beguines, and recluses living in close proximity. Let me introduce these sources more fully before analyzing the theory and practice of clairvoyance enshrined in them.

Thirteenth-Century Lives: The Database Medieval mind reading is not limited to saints from this particular time and place. Indeed, striking cases can be found in earlier and later Lives, such as those of the English hermit Godric of Finchale (ca. 1065–1170) and the activist prophet Birgitta of Sweden (1303–73).6 To avoid an uncontrolled proliferation of examples, however, I have confined myself to a single hagiographic corpus that is large, rich, and cohesive enough to have inspired several composite studies (Table 1).7 That corpus testifies to the pastoral revolution of the thirteenth century, following the Fourth Lateran Council’s ambitious program of fully converting the laity through preaching, regular confession, and reception of the Eucharist. To that end, miraculous mind reading became an invaluable tool. Remarkably, the gift is not exclusively or even primarily ascribed to priests. As we will see, its prominence as a lay or female charism is central to its meaning. My database consists of fourteen Vitae honoring eleven women and three men, whose lives span the “long thirteenth century” from Marie d’Oignies (d. 1213) to Elisabeth of Spalbeek (d. after 1304). I will call them “saints” for convenience because, though none has been officially canonized, several are locally venerated and styled as Blessed. Their hagiographers also merit consideration, for they are by and large a distinguished lot. Nine of the fourteen Vitae have named authors, and two more are based on known sources. Two writers in particular, Thomas of

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Table 1. Thirteenth-Century Lives: The Database Saint Abundus of Huy

Dates

Status or affiliation

1189–ca. 1239

Cistercian monk of Villers Arnulf of Villers d. 1228 Cistercian lay brother of Villers Beatrice of 1200–1268 Cistercian prioress Nazareth of Nazareth Christina ca. 1150–1224 freelance holy Mirabilis woman Elisabeth of ca. 1246–after beguine, stigmatic, Spalbeek 1304 prophet Ida of Gorsleeuw fl. ca. 1245–70 Cistercian nun of “the Gentle” La Ramée Ida of Leuven “the fl. ca. 1235–75 beguine, Cistercian Eager” nun of Roozendaal Ida of Nivelles “the 1199–1231 Cistercian nun of Compassionate” La Ramée Juliana of 1193–1258 Augustinian Cornillon prioress, beguine, recluse Lutgard of 1182–1246 Cistercian nun of Aywières Aywières Margaret of Ypres 1216–37 domestic recluse Marie d’Oignies

ca. 1177–1213

Simon of Aulne

ca. 1164–1229

Yvette of Huy

1158–1228

married beguine, hospital nurse Cistercian lay brother of Aulne vowess, recluse, hospital manager

Hagiographer Goswin of Villers, ca. 1234–39 Goswin of Villers, ca. 1235–37 Unknown; based on her diary Thomas of Cantimpré, 1232 Philip of Clairvaux, ca. 1267–72 Unknown cleric, late 13th/early 14th c. Unknown cleric, 14th c. Goswin of Villers, ca. 1232–33 Eve of Saint-Martin, redacted by an unknown cleric, 1261–64 Thomas of Cantimpré, 1246–48 Thomas of Cantimpré, ca. 1240–43 Jacques de Vitry, 1215–16 Anonymous monk of Aulne, ca. 1229 Hugh of Floreffe, ca. 1229–30

Cantimpré and Goswin of Villers, especially promoted the theme of miraculous mind reading and gave it their distinctive literary stamp. But they did not invent the motif, which may already have been widespread in the local religious culture. Marie d’Oignies is the most famous of these figures because the prominence of her publicist, Jacques de Vitry, gave her Life a wide circulation. A laywoman living in a chaste marriage, Marie worked as a nurse for several years at the height of the leprosy pandemic, then turned to the contemplative life before

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dying in her mid-thirties. She is sometimes called “the first beguine,” which is not quite accurate, because she never intended to found a movement. Yet her widely read and translated Vita did much to promote the beguines’ way of life.8 Jacques de Vitry (d. 1240), the author of that celebrated Life, was a towering figure in the early thirteenth-century church. As a canon regular in Oignies, he came to know and revere Marie, even regarding her as his spiritual mother. An enthusiastic supporter of the holy women of Liège, he wrote her Vita in 1215–16, shortly after her death and, even more significant, in the wake of Fourth Lateran. At the same time, Jacques was a zealous crusade preacher, involved in both the Albigensian Crusade (1211–13) and the Fifth Crusade (1218–20). Cementing a connection between embattled orthodoxy and religious women’s sacramental piety, especially their devotion to the Eucharist, he dedicated Marie’s Vita to the crusading bishop Fulk of Toulouse. Elected bishop of Acre in 1214 and cardinal in 1229, Jacques would thereafter divide his extensive literary efforts between sermons and history.9 His protégé, Thomas of Cantimpré (ca. 1200–ca. 1270), began his own hagiographic career with a Supplement to Marie’s Life (ca. 1230), which he wrote to chastise his mentor in Marie’s name for abandoning the women of Liège to make his ecclesiastical career in the Holy Land.10 As a young man Thomas entered the Augustinian house of Cantimpré, but he transferred to the Dominican order in 1232. Active as an itinerant preacher and confessor, he wrote a highly successful encyclopedia as well as a popular book of exempla.11 To his mind, exempla and hagiography were two sides of one coin, a saint’s Life being an exemplum writ large. So, after completing his Supplement on Marie, Thomas composed the Lives of three other holy women.12 His first was a favorite with medieval readers that continues to charm—and bewilder—scholars of hagiography. This is the Life of Christina, called Mirabilis, or the Astonishing (d. 1224)—a freelance holy woman of peasant birth.13 Thomas begins his Vita with her youthful death, followed by the spectacular miracle of her corpse levitating at her funeral, then returning to life. While dead, Christina experiences an otherworld vision in which, after seeing souls tormented in purgatory, she volunteers to relieve their pain by undergoing the same tortures on earth. Although she experiences agony from her self-inflicted torments, they cannot harm her, because she possesses a glorified resurrection body. Viewed from a more naturalistic perspective, Christina appears to have suffered from a serious mental illness, but she eventually became more stable.14 For eight years she lived with the recluse Jutta of Borgloon, who trained her in Latin, and later became friendly with the nuns of St. Catherine’s in Sint-Truiden (SaintTrond). But she never took vows or joined a community.

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Thomas’s next subject, Margaret of Ypres (d. 1237), was a young woman whose extreme asceticism led to her premature death at twenty-one.15 Margaret can best be described as a domestic recluse. Her spiritual life was wholly dominated by her Dominican confessor, Friar Zeger, with whom she was in love. Although she is sometimes styled a Dominican tertiary, there is no evidence that she took vows. Thomas did not personally know either of these women, but he was able to interview Jutta and the nuns of St. Catherine’s about Christina, who had become the subject of a rich, contentious folklore. His Life of Margaret relies entirely on the reminiscences of her confessor. The friar’s final Vita, often considered his masterpiece, lay closest to his heart because its subject, Lutgard of Aywières (d. 1246), had been his own spiritual mother.16 A Dutch speaker from Tongeren, Lutgard was professed at the Dutch-speaking Benedictine nunnery of St. Catherine’s, where she came to know Christina Mirabilis. On Christina’s advice she decided to leave Sint-Truiden for Aywières, a francophone Cistercian house, out of a desire for contemplative leisure. Once there, Lutgard refused to master French so that she would never have to serve as prioress, but she won fame as a mystic, healer, and spiritual guide. Thomas wrote her Vita for the abbess of Aywières in exchange for a cherished relic, the saint’s finger. Thomas of Cantimpré almost certainly knew Goswin, cantor of the Cistercian abbey of Villers, to whom we owe three more Vitae.17 That monastery was a hotbed of hagiographic activity at the time, well known for its interest in women’s spirituality and its supervision of nunneries.18 Cantors were often active as hagiographers because their duties included maintaining an abbey’s library and scriptorium, as well as writing up everyday death notices. So their position required literary as well as musical skills. Two of the Vitae by Goswin were commissioned by his abbot, who requested Lives of Ida of Nivelles (written ca. 1232–33) and the lay brother Arnulf of Villers (ca. 1235–37). The short-lived Ida (d. 1231), called “Ida the Compassionate” to distinguish her from two other saintly nuns of the same name, belonged to the house of La Ramée.19 Probably consumptive, she was a visionary with a gift for prayer. Ida’s Vita celebrates her close friendship with Beatrice of Nazareth, another Cistercian who features in her own Vita. Goswin devoted his final Life to his friend and brother monk, Abundus of Huy (d. ca. 1239), whom he admired so much that he wrote the Vita while his friend was still alive.20 It thus lacks an essential component of hagiography—an account of its subject’s holy death. Like Thomas of Cantimpré, Goswin had a distinctive literary style and a special interest in miraculous mind reading. His most spectacular Life describes the feats of a lay brother at his abbey, Arnulf of Villers (d. 1228).21 A savage ascetic

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with a penchant for hair shirts made from hedgehog pelts, Arnulf had a wide network of lay friends and clients, whom he met in the course of his work as a delivery driver for the abbey’s granges. He developed a reputation as a skilled mind reader and effective intercessor. Even more celebrated was his contemporary, Simon of Aulne (d. 1229), a lay brother at a neighboring Cistercian abbey.22 Simon is unusual because, despite his noble birth, he chose religious life at the age of sixteen as a conversus rather than a monk. He traveled widely; anecdotes in his fragmentary Vita place him in Rome, Paris, and Cologne, as well as the Netherlandish centers of Liège, Dinant, Huy, Maubeuge, and the far-flung granges of his abbey. Despite his lowly status in the order, the privilege of birth gave him access to the elite of his society. Simon was close to Pope Innocent III, fraternized easily with bishops and abbots, and is credited with securing the promotion of several “friends and acquaintances” to the episcopate. His remarkable gift of clairvoyance made him a celebrity within and beyond his order. Caesarius of Heisterbach, who knew him personally, includes ten anecdotes about Simon’s mind reading in a long chapter of his Dialogue on Miracles, under the distinctio on Confession.23 Jacques de Vitry also alludes to Brother Simon in two of his works,24 and the Cistercian chronicler Alberic of Trois-Fontaines tells under the year 1225 how he helped unmask a pretender claiming to be Emperor Baldwin of Constantinople.25 Simon appears yet again as an adviser to Hugh of Pierrepont, the reformist bishop of Liège, in the Life of Odilia of Liège.26 To his contemporaries, Simon was the best known of all the Liègeois saints, yet he has remained all but inaccessible to modern scholars. This is because he had the bad luck to die in December, the month the Bollandists left out when they ceased publishing the Acta Sanctorum. A monk of Aulne began a Life of the famous brother soon after his death in 1229 but seems not to have finished it. This text now survives only in a Jesuit’s copy from 1637 and has never been edited. But the Vita Simonis was known to Thomas of Cantimpré, who cited it while telling another story about the saint in his Vita Lutgardis. It also inspired a humanist adaptation by François Moschus (1600), a French translation of Moschus by Jean d’Assignies (1603), and a series of fifty captioned drawings by the artist Pierre Jouet (1621), commissioned by the abbot of Aulne.27 Two other saints in our corpus have known hagiographers: Yvette of Huy and Elisabeth of Spalbeek. Yvette (d. 1228), born to a wealthy urban family, was forced into an arranged marriage at thirteen and had three children. But her husband died when she was eighteen, much to her relief, and she chose to become a vowess, a widow resolved to remain chaste. Like Marie d’Oignies, she spent some time nursing lepers, eventually becoming chief fundraiser and unof-

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ficial manager of a hospital. At the age of thirty-three she had herself enclosed as an anchoress, embarking on a long career in what we would now call spiritual direction. Her Vita was written by Hugh of Floreffe, a Premonstratensian canon who knew her well, around 1229–30. Hugh’s abbot, John of Floreffe, had been Yvette’s confessor and commissioned her Life.28 Another atypical holy woman, Elisabeth of Spalbeek (d. after 1304), is best known for the public performances of Christ’s Passion that she gave in her teens— an energetic mimesis that electrified spectators. She performed this solo Passion play daily for several years in ecstatic trance, even though she was an invalid unable to leave her bed when not entranced.29 Her hagiographer was none other than Philip, the powerful abbot of Clairvaux, who came to witness her performance ca. 1267–72. Philip’s text began as a probatio, an inquiry into the authenticity of Elisabeth’s trance states, but the abbot became a convinced believer and augmented his eyewitness report with hagiographic details about her virtues and miracles, which included the stigmata.30 In her twenties Elisabeth reappears in an entirely new context, now as a controversial prophet being interrogated about a high-stakes intrigue at the French court.31 Of her later life almost nothing is known. There is probably no truth to a late tradition that she became a nun. Two of our Vitae are based on female-authored sources, both unfortunately lost. The highly literate Juliana of Cornillon (d. 1258), whose visions, lobbying efforts, and liturgical compositions inspired the Corpus Christi feast, lived an extremely checkered life.32 An orphan raised at the leper hospital of Cornillon, she served as its prioress under the Augustinian Rule, though she was not involved in the community’s nursing mission. Violent conflicts with the prior and the civic authorities of Liège over the hospital’s management compelled her to flee in 1248. After a tumultuous period in exile at a series of convents, she spent four or five years as a beguine. Eventually she found asylum at the Cistercian nunnery of Salzinnes but was never professed. After that community in turn was dispersed by warfare, she closed her eventful life as a recluse. A portion of Juliana’s Life was written in French by her intimate friend, the recluse Eve of Saint-Martin, who assisted her in promoting Corpus Christi. An unknown cleric adapted this text and translated it into Latin (1261–64), adding some official documents related to the feast. In fact, promoting the celebration of Corpus Christi was his primary purpose. A learned cleric and biblical scholar, he may have belonged to the Parisian theological circle around Hugh of Saint-Cher. Juliana’s contemporary, Beatrice of Nazareth (d. 1268), was professed at the Cistercian house of Maagdendaal but left in 1237 to become prioress at Nazareth, a monastery founded by her father.33 A mystic and vernacular theologian,

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Beatrice wrote a spiritual diary in Dutch, which does not survive except for a brief treatise entitled “Seven Manners of Love.”34 At some point after her death, her diary came into the hands of an unknown cleric who Latinized it, adding some conventional hagiographic topoi. Beatrice’s first-person account supplied an intimate portrait of her spiritual life, but this was also a limiting factor. After she became prioress she was too busy to continue writing, so the hagiographer lacked information about her last thirty years. Further, the journal focused almost exclusively on her relationship with God rather than other people. Because of this restricted range, the Vita has little to say about our theme of mind reading, with the important exception of Beatrice’s friendship with Ida of Nivelles. Finally, there remain two Cistercian nuns: Ida “the Gentle” of Gorsleeuw (d. ca. 1270) and Ida “the Eager” of Leuven (d. ca. 1275). The first was a sister at La Ramée, the same convent where Ida of Nivelles had lived a generation earlier.35 Ida of Leuven became a nun at Roozendaal after spending many years as a beguine.36 We have little trustworthy information about either one, but both Lives are valuable witnesses to the region’s religious culture. Martinus Cawley, their translator, speculates that Ida of Gorsleeuw’s biographer was a diocesan priest of Liège, perhaps a relative. He was definitely not Cistercian, and despite his use of oral sources, there are major lacunae in his knowledge.37 This Vita is a tissue of ecstasies, eucharistic cravings, and inedia. The latest of these texts, the Life of Ida of Leuven was written long after her death, sometime in the fourteenth century, when all her friends were gone. Its clerical author may have been commissioned by the nuns of Roozendaal to craft a Life from the disorganized notes left by her confessor, whether in Dutch or in Latin.38 With no allusions to datable persons or events, this Life is useless as biography, but its anecdotes of mind reading shed a revealing light on Ida’s milieu. In sum, eight of our fourteen saints had Cistercian affiliations: five nuns, a monk, and two lay brothers. The other six—Marie d’Oignies, Christina Mirabilis, Yvette of Huy, Juliana of Cornillon, Margaret of Ypres, and Elisabeth of Spalbeek—had shifting vocations that are hard to classify. Three were involved for a time with leper hospitals, and all spent portions of their lives as beguines or recluses, two religious identities that were not always clearly distinct. Of the hagiographers, one was a high-ranking secular prelate, one a Dominican, one Premonstratensian, one a female recluse, and three Cistercians. It is clear that miraculous mind reading was a favorite theme of the white monks; we also find it in the exempla of Caesarius of Heisterbach. But it is by no means exclusively Cistercian, as it occurs in nearly all of these southern Netherlandish Vitae and constitutes one of their major contributions to hagiography.39 By analyzing

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these fourteen Lives, then, we will find ample evidence for saintly clairvoyance in all its forms.

Hidden Sins: Mind Reading and the Confessional When hagiographers recount incidents of telepathy in their vitae, they present them as evidence of prophecy. In an influential definition by Gregory the Great, that charism includes knowledge of past and present as well as future events. By reviewing examples from Scripture, Gregory concludes that the essence of prophecy is not to disclose the future but to expose the hidden.40 His definition was often cited in such texts as the Vita Julianae: “Prophecy deals with the future when anything that lies hidden in the future is foretold. It deals with the past when it reveals knowledge of events which have taken place, but the prophet has not seen or heard about them. And it deals with the present when the secrets of the heart are disclosed, for just as an event may be hidden in the future, so thoughts and feelings are concealed in the heart. In another sense, prophecy deals with the present when a thing is hidden not by the mind but by space, yet laid bare by the Spirit.”41 It is under the rubric of prophecy, therefore, that hagiographers deal with mind reading. Because prophecy involves speaking truth to power, telepathic saints are in a strong position to critique both secular and clerical abuses, and their hagiographers frequently play up this role. From our perspective, miraculous mind reading also implies coinherence. The conscience of one person is transparently open to another, without the medium of words. But this form of permeability differs in important ways from the erotics of pedagogy, in which the student strives mentally and physically to internalize the teacher’s persona. First, it is not direct but triangulated. Although the saint has access to the client’s thoughts, this is explicitly mediated by God or, in the case of demoniacs, the devil. Thus telepathy is not only prophetic but strictly miraculous. Possessing such abilities counts as proof of a saint’s election or a demoniac’s possession. Second, the coinherence between teacher and student privileges the body. Even if the chief content of pedagogy is intellectual and moral, the charisma of the teacher is legible on his body, and his physical bearing constitutes an indispensable part of his teaching. Miraculous mind reading, on the other hand, is all about the spirit; it aims to transcend the body altogether. Some of the most astonishing cases take place not only without words but even without bodily presence. By the power of telepathy, two people can “meet” in the spirit and exchange confidences while both are rapt in trance

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or physically far apart. Mind reading therefore raises its practitioners above the space-time continuum, creating an alternative sacred “space” in which mystical coinherence can unite two favored souls as they meet in the mind of God. In this way, the grace of telepathy on earth anticipates its universality in heaven, as represented by Dante in the Paradiso. When a saint uses this gift in a pastoral context to reveal hidden sins, it becomes a powerful salvific tool. Like Jesus the mind reader, the holy person participates in divine omniscience, using her miraculous knowledge to guide and heal a client. There can be a pedagogical element here as well, as the gift is frequently used in the context of a mentoring or counseling relationship. At least in this set of vitae, however, mind reading is overwhelmingly a lay gift. The saint’s charismatic knowledge complements the priest’s sacramental authority, much as holy women’s eucharistic visions and raptures complemented the clerical power to consecrate. For example, Jacques de Vitry notes that one holy woman “perceived the sins of many people who had not been absolved through a true confession. As a result of having announced these hidden sins to many people and inviting them to confess them, she was, after God, the cause of their salvation.”42 Only the confessor can absolve—but without the saint’s mind reading, the sinners would never have confessed. Of course they could also reject prophetic admonitions and refuse to do so, and in that case, the charism could lead to public shaming. Many of the Lives include broad statements crediting their subjects with prophetic powers. Christina Mirabilis, writes Thomas of Cantimpré, “was illumined with the spirit of prophecy in many things, admonished many to their salvation, and privately reprimanded many for their secret and hidden sins and recalled them to penance.”43 Yvette of Huy struck the fear of God into her neighbors: “Everyone who lived with her and knew her . . . [confirmed] that if they had anything in their hearts which they wished to keep secret from her, anything that they thought no one knew but God,” the recluse would “familiarly expose the whole in complete detail as though their secret conscience had been stripped naked.”44 Arnulf of Villers could read “the books of people’s consciences, all scrawled and smudged with the hideous lettering of the devil’s quill.” After viewing those sinister texts, “he would make utmost use of the scalpel of holy exhortation, and of devout prayer, to erase the deadly script.”45 Likewise, Ida of Nivelles could “see among secrets of another’s heart what is subject to none of the senses.”46 The monk Abundus revealed hidden sins at the behest of the Virgin. Sometimes she would send him as her special envoy to one of his brothers, with supernatural signs that would motivate that monk to “turn aside from such and such sins.”47

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As a choir monk, Abundus is the only one of our subjects who could have been a priest, yet his friend and biographer never hints that he was. According to Simon of Aulne’s Vita, Pope Innocent III wanted to ordain the lay brother to the priesthood so he could absolve the sins he discerned by mind reading, but he declined the offer out of humility.48 Thus, in striking contrast to later saints such as Padre Pio, these thirteenth-century figures were not empowered to hear sacramental confessions, only to enable and encourage them. In this they resemble (and indeed, overlap with) charismatic women who could infallibly distinguish a consecrated from an unconsecrated host, although they themselves lacked power to consecrate.49 The saints’ supernatural awareness of guilt, as of holiness, helped to create a sacred penumbra around the key sacraments of high medieval devotion. After the novice in Caesarius’s Dialogue on Miracles hears about Simon’s mind reading, he says with awe, “It seems more miraculous to know the secrets of hearts and reveal hidden thoughts than to raise the dead.”50 If God surrounded the sacrament of penance with so many astounding miracles, it must deserve the most profound reverence. Mind reading creates a kind of glamour around confession, much like the glamour that visions of the Christ Child in the host conferred on the Eucharist. Many saints employed the charism within an intimate pastoral relationship. Marie d’Oignies, for example, had a spiritual daughter named Heldewidis, a recluse, whom she “nourished . . . in the Lord like a mother.” Whenever she was tempted or troubled, Marie “knew what was in the mind of the astonished person” and so forearmed her against temptations before they struck.51 Jacques de Vitry himself had a comparable relationship with Marie. As a novice preacher he was prone to rambling and burdening his sermons with too many authorities. Marie detected those flaws but, wishing to spare the priest embarrassment, “wondrously opened the double wound” of his temptations (to vanity and ace­ dia) by telling a discreet parable, which hit the nail on the head.52 Instead of a formal critique of his sermons, which she was not authorized to give, Marie cast the problem as a pastoral matter in which she could intervene. Often the miraculous gift helped to equalize the power balance between priests and their female charges—for if Jacques closely scrutinized the religious women of his diocese, he faced the same scrutiny from them. Lutgard of Aywières once perceived that the cleric “loved a certain religious woman” (not Marie) “with an all too human love.” So much time did he devote to her, though without carnal desire, that he became negligent in preaching. Lutgard prayed with tears for his release. Whether or not she dared to mention this infatuation to Jacques, he persisted in it. So Lutgard gave Christ an ultimatum: either hearken to my prayers or

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sever your bond with me! After this plea she was answered at once—and Jacques, now enlightened about his peril, “blessed his divine Liberator and his handmaid.”53 This tale is told by Thomas of Cantimpré, Jacques’s protégé, who had earlier criticized him for abandoning the mulieres sanctae to pursue a highpowered ecclesiastical career. Without Lutgard, Thomas suggests, Jacques would have been seriously distracted from his preaching mission—just as, by Jacques’s own confession, it was Marie whose guidance made him a better preacher. Mind reading often functioned in the context of mentoring or spiritual direction. Ida of Nivelles was advising a novice at another convent, who unfortunately slipped into fornication with a priest. The nun learned of their sin through a vision of two toads coupling. Afterward the male toad “went totally crazy” and hopped away, but the female slunk back to Ida. When the guiltridden novice returned, therefore, Ida consoled and exhorted her to penance, unsurprised, with a promise of intercession.54 The novice presumably confessed to a priest as well, but her exchange with Ida includes every aspect of the sacrament—except absolution, which she could not give. The later Ida of Gorsleeuw, also a mind reader, perceived the “hidden vice” of another nun “which entirely escaped outward notice and could never be detected by a mortal.” After Ida “gently” revealed it to the sinner, the nun replied sarcastically, “Been seeing your visions, have you?” In this case, a miraculous intervention yielded not penance but wrath. A little less gently, Ida then informed her sister that God was angry: “Because of this vice . . . you have missed out on a very special grace and on many a gift of considerable worth.”55 Here we glimpse the relational ambiguity of the gift. For obvious reasons, not everyone relished the “grace” of having his or her secret sins made manifest, so befriending a prophet could be risky. A hypocritical priest, living in a “cesspool of carnal wantonness,” asked Arnulf of Villers for his prayers. But what good could my prayers do, replied the lay brother, so long as you remain unashamed of your miserable life? The priest feigned surprise, so Arnulf obliged him with “an explicit account of his detestable doings, his unmentionable carryings on and the whole state of his conscience, with all its malicious and impure thinking.” Now “touched to the quick with grief [and] flushed to the face with shame,” the priest repented, but he never dared to return to Arnulf.56 It must have been years later that he told the tale to Goswin. Other tales about Arnulf shed light on gender relations at Villers. As a lay brother, he drove a supply wagon to and from the abbey’s granges, stopping for pickups and deliveries and bringing alms to villagers along the way. So he had more contact with the laity than did professed monks and made quite a few

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friends. One of them, an anchoress, was mentoring a young student, but she became concerned that he was missing too many classes while hovering around her window. Perhaps worried too about her chastity and distraction from her prayers, she began to distance herself, finally telling him to stay away for a month. The author of the Middle English Ancrene Wisse would have praised her conduct. But the boy complained bitterly to the Lord—and perhaps also to Arnulf, although this is never stated. Soon afterward the recluse came down with a fever. “And deservedly so,” Arnulf told her on his next visit; she deserved this punishment for “senselessly rebuffing” a spiritual son. Indeed, God had planned to withdraw his grace entirely, but “informed of this from on high,” Arnulf had interceded to let her escape with a mere sickness. Astounded, the recluse confirmed his account.57 Though he was normally stern about sexual behavior, in this case the saint privileged the boy’s yearning over conventional advice to anchoresses. Whether he truly read his friend’s mind, as Goswin assumes, or simply intervened in a conflict between the recluse and the student, Arnulf ’s authority normalized a situation that many could have found problematic. Simon of Aulne was so famous for clairvoyance that he won some extraordinary privileges. After he refused Innocent III’s offer to ordain him, the pope gave Simon the right to choose any confessor he wished for those whose hidden sins he revealed. We see him sending a woman to the well-known pastor John of Nivelle, and a sinful cleric to a master of theology in Paris.58 Even more surprisingly, Simon at times stood in as a third party at confessions. His reputation reached as far as Rome, where a notary at the Curia hit on the novel idea of making a general confession in Simon’s presence. If he left anything out, the notary thought, the lay brother would remind him, and if he was embarrassed and spoke minus plene, he would goad him with particulars. So the cleric traveled all the way from Italy to the region of Liège—and was not disappointed. As soon as Simon laid eyes on the man, he telepathically sensed his purpose. The lay brother first heard his confession, the details of which he already knew by mind reading, then listened in as the cleric repeated his sins to a priest. If he forgot any sin, Simon filled it in; if he omitted specifics “out of forgetfulness [or] shame,” Simon would supply the age of the cleric, his motives, the place where he had sinned, and so forth. After this remarkable experience, the notary returned to Rome with joy, saying like the Queen of Sheba that all the tales he had heard did not reveal even half the man’s wisdom (3 Kings 10:6–7).59 Later Simon exhorted a woman to confess in his presence and corrected her as he had done with the notary, “just as if he had seen her sinning.”60 Since women were expected to confess titillating sexual sins, the inclusion of a third party is still

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more unexpected. I have found only one other example of third parties at confession, and its context is quite different. Robert of Courçon (d. 1219) says that if a young woman knows her parish priest is a lecher, “it is sound advice for her to bring her father, mother, or some close friend before the priest and confess to them together—as, before a witness, the priest would not dare to solicit her for lechery as he would do in secret.”61 Simon’s exceptional role points to an acute dilemma in sacramental theology: could the routinized practice of confession really substitute for the shock of a charismatic encounter? The novice in Caesarius’s dialogue raises that very question. “Would that all confessors had the spirit of this lay brother,” he remarks, “for then those who confessed could conceal no sin from them, either through shame or through ignorance.” Caesarius concedes that most priests lack Simon’s gift, “yet many have a spirit of wisdom and prudence that makes up for that defect.”62 Or so one might hope. In this respect, as Alexander Murray remarks, confession differs from all other sacraments. As long as a priest is validly ordained, he needs no special wisdom to say Mass or baptize. In fact, it was an ancient heresy (Donatism) to claim that the validity of the sacraments depended on the good character of the priest. But in confession, it does—at least in a spiritual if not a canonical sense. Devout penitents felt the need of counsel, exhortation, and encouragement, while casual ones required instruction and even stern warnings to persuade them of the seriousness of sin. Confessors’ manuals could provide guidance but no more; they could not supply “a spirit of wisdom and prudence”—much less holiness—where it was lacking. Hence “in this field alone, it was legal to be a ‘Donatist’; and people were.”63 “Omnis utriusque sexus,” the famous canon of Fourth Lateran, mandates annual confession and Communion, but it also voices a deep-seated ambivalence about the sacrament of penance. On the one hand, it requires penitents to confess annually to their own parish priest, not shop around for a wiser or more lenient confessor. On the other hand, the same canon stresses that a priest “should be discerning and prudent” like an expert physician. The wounds of the soul, like those of the body, vary immensely, demanding a wide range of treatments in accord with the nature of the disease as well as the patient. Hence cura animarum est ars artium: “the care of souls is the art of arts.”64 In search of those expert physicians, not to be found in every village, penitents did shop around. From the early thirteenth century, monks and friars often competed successfully with parish priests for the right to hear confessions. As our Vitae show, many people preferred charismatic women and lay brothers to uninspired priests, accounting for the popularity of these tales about them. Ordinary con-

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fession might feel like an exercise in humiliation and clerical control, if not merely a hollow ritual. But the presence of a saintly mind reader like Simon of Aulne changed everything. If another human being could know all of one’s sins by sheer miracle, that was sure proof that God himself knew and cared about them, both to judge and to forgive. More often than any other saint except Simon, the anchoress Yvette of Huy is credited with revealing hidden sins. Under the influence of the Ancrene Wisse, we tend to think of anchoresses as solitary figures far removed from society. But in fact, their ministry was often quite public. As Anneke Mulder-Bakker argues, some anchoresses can even be seen as female counterparts of the parish priest, and Yvette is a case in point.65 Like a parish priest, she was always available for counsel, consolation, and confession, which made up in charisma what it lacked in sacerdotal authority. A mature thirty-three at the time of her enclosure, Yvette did not live alone but together with another recluse, an apprentice, and her old nurse. Their anchorhold was attached to the leprosarium of Huy, where she had once cared for patients and later served as fundraiser and, for all practical purposes, manager of the hospital. Other women lived in nearby cells, constituting a small community that she founded for her disciples. MulderBakker points out that the ritual of enclosure, still quite new in Yvette’s lifetime, ended with the chanting of the Benedictus, or Canticle of Zacharias. A celebration of John the Baptist, that canticle includes the verses: “And you, child, will be called the prophet of the Most High, for you will go before the Lord to prepare his ways, to give knowledge of salvation to his people in the forgiveness of their sins” (Luke 1:76–77). In effect, the enclosure of a recluse could be seen as the ordination of a prophet.66 Yvette’s prophetic role involved mind reading in both private and public settings. One Christmas as she lay sick in bed, she had a vision of demons joyfully flocking around a young disciple as she approached Communion. When the anchoress told the girl in question, she admitted her guilt: at that holy moment, all her thoughts had been fixed on the handsome face of a cleric.67 But Yvette’s pastoral authority extended far beyond her women, for her reputation enabled her to summon even influential clergy to her window to accuse them. She and her biographer were deeply critical of the clerics at their collegiate church, St. Mary of Huy, and in several tales she pronounces judgment against them. Knowing by revelation that a sacristan had slept with a woman in church, Yvette sent urgent messengers to both the cleric and his mistress. The latter agreed to confess and do penance, but the former refused to come, disregarding the messenger’s warning of imminent judgment. Sure enough—as usual in such

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tales—he soon died a sudden, miserable death without the last rites.68 Another tale of judgment concerns a lustful priest who takes advantage of a matron’s devotions to seduce her. Their affair continues until, after some time, the woman becomes ill. Fearing to be exposed through her confession, the priest sends the old woman they used as a go-between to assure his mistress of her recovery. Trusting this false counsel, she dies in a state of mortal sin and so is damned. When Yvette learns by revelation of his sins, she accuses the priest to his face. He first denies it, then makes excuses, but finally puts on a show of repentance, promising to become a Cistercian. Needless to say, he breaks his promise and soon joins his mistress in hell.69 Most remarkable, though, is Yvette’s warning to the dean of St. Mary’s, described as an avaricious, loose-living usurer. In a vision she sees Christ sentencing him to hell, so she brings him to her window by stating, slyly enough, that she wants to confess. It is here that we see the double-edged potential of the sacrament. The devout were accustomed to confess not only their sins but also their graces and supernatural experiences, ostensibly to authenticate them and unmask any diabolical illusions. Texts on the discernment of spirits formalized this requirement in the late Middle Ages, but thirteenth-century Vitae already contain many instances.70 Taking advantage of this norm, Yvette tells the dean “in confession” that she has had such-and-such a vision—and then proceeds to confess his sins, pleading with him to amend his ways and do penance. Ignoring her counsel, he too dies a wretched death, and her prophetic vision becomes eternal fact.71 Much as Thomas of Cantimpré had used the charisms of Marie and Lutgard to rebuke his mentor, Jacques de Vitry, in this case Hugh of Floreffe uses Yvette’s gift to attack the clergy of Huy. These anecdotes must have resonated with local readers as a politically powerful critique, extending the role Yvette played in life as a divinely sanctioned gadfly. In this case, a saint’s charismatic authority does not complement that of priests but reveals their corruption. On occasion, women’s visions expose priests who should not be celebrating at all. Yvette confides to a curate that his vicar celebrates Mass negligently, and, sure enough, when the curate returns to church he finds a fragment of the consecrated host on the altar, unattended.72 Another time when the recluse wants to receive Communion, her priest inexplicably denies her. She is consoled by a visionary Mass celebrated by St. John the Evangelist, who even lets her serve at the altar—as no woman could do in the flesh. Unvesting after Mass, St. John explains that the priest had refused her Communion because he had recently slept with a whore and did not dare to touch Christ’s body—an offense Yvette reveals “secretly and mildly” to the guilty cleric.73 Ida of Leuven, with her pas-

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sionate devotion to the Eucharist, was surprised that whenever a certain priest celebrated, she felt none of her usual sweetness. One day the dean came to church, and Ida questioned him, asking if that priest had been legitimately ordained. Scandalized, the dean tells her the priest had been suspended for some offense and had no authority to say Mass.74 Miraculous mind reading here converges with eucharistic devotion, once again to the shame of unworthy priests. Public shaming, or even the threat of it, could be a powerful weapon. When Simon of Aulne met three women on the road, he knew immediately that one was guilty of fornication. The women laughed and insulted him, so he seized the culprit and threatened to publish the place, the day, and the name of her companion unless she confessed.75 After a fellow conversus refused to repent his carnal sins, Simon predicted—accurately—that he would soon be caught in the act.76 The renowned brother was often consulted to identify thieves and locate stolen goods, and if anyone entertained a skeptical thought about his prophetic powers, he at once discerned and exposed them. So it should be no surprise that, if we can trust his Vita, he was the target of no fewer than four attempts on his life, all miraculously foiled.77 Both clergy and laity could be shamed by a saint’s telepathic knowledge. Elisabeth of Spalbeek, whose performance drew large crowds, was once visited by a powerful nobleman with his retinue. Immediately she sensed something wrong and burst out, “Lords, for God’s sake, if there is any excommunicate among you, let him depart and not speak with us, lest perchance we come to share in his peril.”78 The nobleman, who had in fact been excommunicated, left without a word, leaving the members of his household to explain. In this case, even though Elisabeth’s prophecy was aimed less at correcting the sinner than protecting herself from contagion, her words drew notice. Another holy woman, Christina Mirabilis, was never one to respect social conventions. Once when her patron, Count Louis of Loon, was conversing with the Duke of Limburg and another count, Christina rushed into the palace and told Louis that one of his companions was a traitor. Later events bore out her prophecy.79 Such incidents earned lasting reputations for both women, bringing them (for better or worse) to political prominence. When Count Louis lay dying, he chose to make his general confession to Christina instead of a priest—much to the embarrassment of Thomas of Cantimpré, who points out that she had no power to absolve. What she could do instead was advise him on the disposition of his goods, offer prayers, and (after a vision of his tortured soul) suffer half his purgatorial pains in her own body.80 As for Elisabeth, when she retired from performing (still young, like athletes and dancers today), she continued to be credited with

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prophetic insight. Malicious accusations had begun to fly after the heir to the French throne died suddenly in 1276, provoking intrigue and scandal. One faction blamed the new queen, Marie of Brabant, for poisoning the prince, while another claimed that the king’s alleged “sins against nature” had aroused God’s wrath. Both factions tried to manipulate Elisabeth into upholding their sides, but despite repeated questioning she refused to be inveigled.81 The incident shows that mind reading, as an aspect of prophecy, could be a two-edged sword. We learn about it from hagiographers, who of course side with their saints, but claiming to know a powerful person’s secret sins was a dangerous move for the prophet. Even the teenaged Margaret of Ypres, who spent most of her time performing brutal self-imposed penances, had a moment of prophetic glory. One day Friar Zeger brought “a noble lady from the ruling family” (the future countess Marguerite of Flanders) to Margaret’s sickbed to ask for her prayers. Although the recluse had often prayed for her before, on seeing her this time she had a sudden revelation. The Lord would “by no means listen” to prayers for that lady, she declared, “ because her hands are filled with blood: every day she plunders my poor by her taxes” (tallias).82 This unexpected charge shocked both Lady Marguerite and Zeger, who asked his disciple under oath if Christ had explicitly used the word “taxes.” Yes, she said—and furthermore, she had never heard that word in any revelation until this day. Unless Lady Marguerite showed greater concern for the poor, there would be hell to pay. It is likely that the recluse had heard others complaining of harsh taxes, for the ruling family’s fiscal policies could not have been secret. What matters, though, is that Margaret’s prophetic word—coming from a young, unworldly ascetic known for her devotion—hit the mark. Thomas claims that as a result, Lady Marguerite “changed many of her policies for the better. Not only did she lighten the burden of her taxes, but she restored many things to those whom she had ravaged.”83 Moreover, she became a devotee of the saintly recluse, who died soon afterward, and as countess, she was an important patron of beguines.84 The cases of Christina Mirabilis, Margaret of Ypres, and Elisabeth of Spalbeek all show that the ability to discern hidden sins—and name them in public—was more than a gimmick of hagiographers. It could change lives or even policies. Perhaps the surest proof that people took saintly mind reading seriously is the fact that demoniacs parodied it. I have used such terms as “clairvoyance” and “telepathy” for convenience, but the heroes of medieval Vitae were not like the subjects of modern ESP experiments. They could read minds and consciences only indirectly, seeing them in the mind of God “unto whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid.”85 That is why

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this form of prophecy was seen as strictly parallel to other types of supernatural knowledge, such as foretelling the future or authenticating relics. Saints could discern the hidden thoughts and deeds of others because of their communion with the divine mind, in which all created minds converge. Importantly, though, they were not the only persons to possess that ability. It was universally believed that demons, though fallen, retained their supernatural knowledge— especially the knowledge of evil. Thus a demoniac (a person possessed or hounded by an evil spirit) could expose hidden sins just as saintly mind readers did. As I have shown elsewhere, the demoniacs of thirteenth-century exempla often parody the charisms of saints, mind reading among them.86 In an addendum to his Dialogue on Miracles, Caesarius presents a chain of exempla in which an obsessa, or female demoniac, taunts sinners publicly with their offenses. Unlike saints, of course, the demon makes these revelations for malicious ends. A monk of Eberbach confided to Caesarius, his fellow Cistercian, that one morning after experiencing a nocturnal emission he was on his way to Mass before confessing that sin. Such embarrassments could be blamed on demons, as this story reveals.87 For as the monk was entering the church, a demoniac on the premises mocked him: “What’s the matter, monk? Didn’t I make you an adulterer last night and bring you a woman? Didn’t you use her at your pleasure?”88 Another obsessa was consulted in forensic matters because her demon, like a mind-reading saint, always knew who had committed which offense. One day a matron, angry at the theft of ten marks, asked the demoniac who had stolen them. The demon offers to name the culprit privately. But the woman, wanting to expose the thief, insists on a public revelation and so exposes herself instead: “It was the cleric who slept with you!”89 Although this woman has earned her shame, some of the demoniacs in Caesarius’s tales do good in spite of themselves, as if to prove that God’s grace is stronger than Satan’s wickedness. A priest’s concubine, Petrissa, repents and has herself enclosed as a recluse, but her resolve is soon tested by a knight with whom she decides to elope. A possessed woman, however, visits each of the pair, speaking in the demon’s voice. “If you commit such a terrible crime,” the evil spirit warns Petrissa, “then I the devil—your master—will swiftly carry your soul off to the bosom of my own master to be tortured in everlasting flames.”90 Next she accosts the knight in the midst of his comrades, shaming him with similar threats. Needless to say, the recluse and the knight rethink their plans. Another exemplum emphasizes that penance truly effaces sins: once an offense has been confessed and absolved, it can no longer be telepathically discerned, not even by a demon. In this tale a knight suspects his wife of adultery with the parish priest but wants to test the rumor before accusing her. So he

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asks the priest to accompany him to a nearby village where a demoniac lives. Once they arrive, the priest divines the knight’s suspicions. In a panic, he feigns a call of nature and goes into a stable, where he falls on his knees before a servant and confesses, even requesting a penance. (Wisely, the servant tells the priest to perform the same penance he would assign to one of his peers for the same sin.) Afterward they meet the obsessus, but now the demon can tell no evil of the priest. He says as much in German for the knight’s benefit—but adds in Latin for the priest’s, “He was justified in the stable.”91 The exemplum proves that since even God “forgets” a sin once it has been confessed, the demon no longer knows of it. So it provides effective propaganda for the sacrament. Interestingly, though, the servant in this tale could no more absolve the priest than Christina Mirabilis could absolve Count Louis. Both stories suggest that the operative element in penance is a contrite confession; formal absolution is icing on the cake. But not all authorities agreed. The status of emergency lay confessions would be debated anew in the fourteenth century, when the Black Death made the question urgent.92 In short, tales of miraculous mind reading buttress the newly central sacrament of penance in the same way that eucharistic miracles uphold the sacrament of the altar. Until now this motif has attracted little notice, yet many of the same saints, the same hagiographers, and the same exempla collections emphasize both. Further, the same canon of Fourth Lateran enforced both annual confession and annual Communion, inseparably linking these sacraments. As Simone Roisin observed in 1947, the hagiographic theme of discerning hidden sins—especially carnal ones—“is not a negligible element in the reconstruction of the past. Parallel to the lofty narratives that hover around a mystical ideal, it shows the other side of the coin . . . the excesses and abuses that, from the eleventh century on, troubled the solicitude of popes.”93 Carnal sins loom large in these vitae, just as they do in confessors’ manuals. Yvette of Huy was a regular scourge of misbehaving priests, while Simon of Aulne put pressure on a courtesan, a single mother planning to kill her baby, a cleric who seduced a nun, a bride who slept with her brother-in-law, an incestuous mother and son, and two young men infected with an “unspeakable disease” (probably homosexuality) that endangered their souls.94 Not surprisingly, the sexual sins of women are identified forthrightly, while those of men are indicated more vaguely. Two parallel stories reveal the gender bias of this Life. As Simon listened to the monks of his abbey fervently chanting psalms, he wondered about their salvation until a divine voice assured him, “All who are here are mine.” On the other hand, while visiting a nunnery in Cologne, he was horrified to realize that not a single adult nun was in a state of grace.95

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Even romance responds to “Omnis utriusque sexus,” or rather, to the wave of lay piety that surged in its wake. The Quest of the Holy Grail (ca. 1225–30) falls within twenty years of the Lives of Marie d’Oignies, Christina Mirabilis, Arnulf of Villers, Simon of Aulne, Ida of Nivelles, and Yvette of Huy, as well as the Dialogue on Miracles. Like all these texts, it surrounds confession and Communion alike with a glamorous, supernatural aura.96 Three of the Grail knights (Sir Lancelot, Sir Perceval, and Sir Bors) confess about as often as they joust. Some of their confessors are white monks, like Caesarius and Goswin, but a surprising number are lay hermits or recluses, who possess an uncanny knowledge of the knights’ temptations, visions, and spiritual aspirations. Perceval’s sister, a holy virgin who belongs to no religious order, has remarkable prophetic abilities and performs at least two miracles. She would be right at home among our Netherlandish Vitae, as would the holy hermits. In fact, like many hermits in the Quest, several hermits and white monks commemorated in thirteenthcentury Vitae were retired knights: Gerlach of Houthem, Bernard the Penitent, Franco of Archennes, and Gobert of Aspremont.97 Men of this class, along with urban patricians (like the fathers of Yvette and Beatrice) and noble ladies (like Countess Marguerite and her sister, Jeanne of Flanders), patronized both new religious foundations and the new fashion for spiritual romance.98 In the fervent diocese of Liège, holy women were just as likely to discern hidden sins as they were to swoon after receiving Communion, and both practices play a significant role in their Lives. Their mind reading also figures as an aspect of the imitatio Christi so important in this era. Just as the new devout strove to imitate Jesus in his poverty and preaching, just as they healed the sick and cast out demons in his name, so too they imitated his ability to read the thoughts of others. Jesus could look at the people he encountered and infallibly discern their faith or doubt, generosity or envy. In the same way his medieval followers, illumined by revelation, could tell who was having an illicit affair, practicing usury, or tempted to blaspheme. But knowledge of hidden sins was not the only form of mind reading practiced by these saints. As we will see, they also perceived secret graces and even cultivated friendships based as much on telepathy as face-to-face colloquies.

Secret Graces, Special Friendships, and “Sending God” While the twelfth century is often seen as the golden age of friendship, especially between monks, our thirteenth-century Vitae testify to many intimate

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friendships between women, as well as cross-gender friendships that united monks and nuns, beguines and friars, lay brothers and recluses in a supple network of religious practice.99 Many of these friendships involved the sharing of secret graces revealed telepathically in times of prayer. In this section I argue that miraculous mind reading served two further functions, beyond glamorizing penance and prophetically attacking the sins of the powerful. In a religious subculture that glorified spiritual intimacy, yet fretted constantly about perils to chastity, it could legitimize dangerous friendships across gender lines by showing that God himself blessed them with his miraculous gifts. Further, in the hands of a theologically astute hagiographer like Goswin of Villers, it enabled the development of a sophisticated theology of prayer, proving that coinherence in God could overcome any distance created by space, time, or language. One of the strongest friendships in this corpus linked two Cistercian nuns, Ida of Nivelles and Beatrice of Nazareth.100 The women met in their late teens when Beatrice, because of her intellectual promise, was sent by her abbess to learn calligraphy at Ida’s house, La Ramée, with its famous scriptorium. The two young nuns quickly formed an “alliance of spiritual love” (dilectionis federa) that lasted until the end of Ida’s brief life. The course of their friendship is hard to reconstruct because Goswin, Ida’s hagiographer, never mentions Beatrice by name. She was still alive when he was writing, and convention barred the names of living persons except under rare circumstances. Beatrice’s hagiographer does name Ida, but since she had died forty years earlier, he is confused about chronology and imagines her as a much older woman, a mentor rather than a peer. Nevertheless, some things seem clear. As a novice, Beatrice had already formed a close friendship with one of her peers, a pact of amicitia spiritualis in which the novices agreed “to stir each other up by admonition in word and example when this was useful, and to rouse each other’s effort toward progress.”101 They shared thoughts on observance of the Rule, obedience, penance, and prayer. At La Ramée, Ida took the place of this early friend, cherishing Beatrice because she had “learned by revelation of the Holy Spirit that [she] would surely be taken by the Lord as his special spouse, and that the fullness of his grace would be poured superabundantly into her soul.”102 These young nuns’ spiritual exchanges give the lie to a common misperception of mysticism as a purely private encounter between God and the soul. Like many in their milieu, Ida and Beatrice experienced it as a social reality. They encountered God in their friendship, and Christ and the Virgin were happy to join in their company. As Goswin explains, when the devout in his region asked each other for prayers, they were accustomed to say, “Send me God!”103 With this astonishing

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formula, they asked their spiritual patrons to procure them favors such as copious tears, visions, or infusions of divine “sweetness.” After the prayers had been promised, the client would eagerly look forward to receiving those graces at a prearranged time, such as Communion on the next feast day. As a form of spiritual gift exchange, “sending God” brought pleasure to both parties, since the patron shared the client’s rapture through his or her own privileged awareness. In the Lives of Beatrice and Ida of Nivelles, we read complementary accounts of what may have been the same experience of sending God. According to Beatrice’s Life, it was Ida who procured her friend’s first mystical experience. Beatrice had begged Ida to pray that she would be initiated into the sweetness experienced only by God’s elect, and Ida promised that at Christmas that grace would be hers. In fact, Christmas passed without incident, but during its octave, Beatrice was rapt in ecstasy with a sublime vision of the Trinity and the court of heaven. Alone among her sisters, Ida knew all about it; from her “the mystery of the secret could not be hidden, for Ida had sought this from God shortly before by her prayers.” Beatrice felt so overwhelmed “that her heart would be torn to pieces by excessive gratitude” if her friend should come any closer.104 Ida’s Life describes either the same or a very similar experience: “One day Ida was raptured away in spirit and had a divine revelation about a person [Beatrice] familiar and very dear to herself. She saw how this person was undergoing the same affective experience that she herself was used to (eodem modo affici . . . quo ipsa affici . . . consueuerat), and was being drawn aloft into the sacred recesses of the divine majesty in the same way she herself was often plunged into the abyss of divine light. Likewise, the person in question had a similar revelation regarding Sister Ida.”105 Far from isolating the mystical subject in a private world, rapture could be profoundly social. Ecstasies tighten the bond between friends who share their most intimate experiences in prayer. Eventually Beatrice finished her training and had to return home, leaving Ida behind. Both friends suffered deeply from the parting. Beatrice’s Life never names this sorrow but admits that on her return to Maagdendaal, she endured six months of torpor and sloth. Finally Beatrice wrote to Ida, begging for prayers and counsel; Ida urged Communion, which seemed to help.106 Goswin tells a related tale. As “this memorable person”—presumably Beatrice—was thinking fondly of her beloved Ida, the Virgin Mary appeared to heal the wound of their parting. “I wish from now on to be as special to your heart as Ida of Nivelles has been,” she said. “I wish you to take the same attitude towards me that you used to take towards Ida. . . . And thus shall we be covenanted together ( foederatae) by a perpetual bond of indissoluble charity . . . And Ida too will be as one of us.”107

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Goswin adds that Ida had a similar vision. Around the same time, while Beatrice was “affectionately praising the Lord from her inmost heart for all the good things he . . . did for Ida,” Christ endorsed their friendship by asking, “Why praise me for what I do for my beloved, or rather for my own very heart? . . . Is Ida not my own very heart and my soul?”108 In these episodes Christ and Mary triangulate the friendship of Ida and Beatrice. Not only do the friends know each other’s thoughts in shared ecstasies; their visions reassure each that the other is equally beloved of God. Coinherence with an earthly friend enables ecstatic union with God, and mystic encounters in turn deepen the friendship. Juliana of Cornillon could easily read the mind of her friend Eve, the recluse of Saint-Martin in Liège. The two women, “mutually bound by an unbreakable chain of charity,” complemented each other’s strengths. Juliana, the more learned of the pair, was also more mystically inclined, while the younger Eve was more pragmatic and had greater self-assurance in dealing with influential churchmen.109 Since her French Life was the Latin writer’s source, the following anecdote must come directly from her. During one of her visits to the anchorhold, Juliana asked Eve if she “would like to reveal the secrets of her heart,” thus proposing to serve as her spiritual director. When Eve timidly held back, Juliana asked, “Why do you think you can hide the secrets of your heart from me, recluse? I know your thoughts about everything as well as if I saw what you are thinking with my own eyes, written in letters on my palm.”110 To prove it, she “started declaring many things that were hidden in the other’s heart,” to Eve’s amazement. From this evidence, says the Vita, Eve knew “that Juliana was truly prophesying: she was proclaiming outwardly what the other knew inwardly.” Henceforth Juliana guided Eve’s spiritual life, while Eve gave her friend strategic advice and shelter from persecution. Later Juliana prophesied Eve’s recovery from a serious illness, not only discerning her state of mind but even predicting the state she would later attain.111 Ida of Gorsleeuw had the same gift. One confidante, a convert to the religious life, curiously wondered if Ida had had any visions about her before her entry. Silent at first, Ida finally let herself be cajoled, revealing what she had seen of the other’s inner state. Thus, “with no shadow of doubt, the woman recognized and understood how the good Maiden had then seen her: she had been raptured in ecstasy up to the unspeakable delights of Paradise and there, amid a spiritual enlightenment, she had contemplated . . . the woman’s very spirit.”112 This language, thick with hagiographic jargon, can hardly be the woman’s own, but the writer must have collected the tale either from her or her confessor. With another friend, a laywoman, the same Ida “habitually knew for certain

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everything that happened” to her—not only her spiritual and emotional troubles but also the special graces she experienced in prayer. “She . . . knew it whenever God visited the woman’s spirit, being aware of how long he stayed and of how the visit went.”113 The God of these Vitae seems eager to authenticate his gifts, using his intimacy with one friend to reassure another of his genuine presence. Like Beatrice and Ida of Nivelles, these two are united, thanks to mind reading, as much by private prayers as by actual visits. The third of our Idas, from Leuven, entered into a new friendship on the basis of someone else’s vision. A young canon, who knew her only slightly, had a disturbing ecstasy in which he saw all his friends torn away from him until Ida alone remained. Distraught, he decided he should get to know her better, so he visited Roozendaal and “immediately recognized” Ida as the nun who had appeared in his vision. Moreover, “as soon as she set eyes upon him, she saw the whole of her own habitual disposition shining forth as clear as light in his soul.”114 Though barely acquainted, the two recognize that they are on the same spiritual path and will achieve equal merit. This Life presents a hagiographic counterpart of a popular romance topos—love at first sight. The nun and the canon at once feel a deep affinity, “as if they had lived together their whole lives long.” Yet it is only with “their inner eyes, unveiled by the Holy Spirit,” that they see themselves bound for a shared destiny in heaven. Thus they became intimate, lifelong friends. Friendship often supplied a context for visions, but in this case an unexpected vision inspired a novel friendship. The Mass, as the universal meeting place of all Christian souls, presents many occasions for mind reading. A large proportion of telepathic tales involve one party knowing another’s experience at Mass even when the two are far apart. These anecdotes hint at a theological conviction that all Masses are in reality a single Mass, for all recapitulate the Last Supper, the Crucifixion, and the Resurrection. In these archetypal events, all believers are joined in coinherence with Christ across the whole extent of time and space. Thus, in the communion of saints, the faithful are never more intimately united than when they receive sacramental Communion. On a more mundane level, the familiar words and ritual of the Mass enabled believers to concentrate their thoughts on a single focus while interceding for those closest to them, and such intercession often yielded a direct entrée into their minds. In a tale popularized by Jacques de Vitry, an unsympathetic priest once rebuked Marie d’Oignies for excessive weeping in church, so she “tearfully implored the Lord” to show him that no human strength could resist God’s gift of tears. Sure enough, the next time that priest celebrated Mass, he “was drowned

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in such a flood of tears that he almost suffocated,” leaving the missal and altar cloths soaking wet.115 Marie, having witnessed the event with her spiritual eyes, reproachfully told the priest what had happened to him. When Jacques himself was ordained in Paris, Marie was “present in spirit although absent in body.” She saw where the ceremony took place, what vestments he wore, and what state of mind he was in at the time.116 Margaret of Ypres, who had a crush on her confessor, knew by revelation when he was about to say Mass on her behalf— the time, the place, and the particular Mass to be celebrated.117 On the feast of the Assumption, Arnulf of Villers saw a monk of his abbey borne into heaven by the Virgin’s grace. While conversing with that monk the next day, he dissolved into laughter, which he explained as a response to the monk’s holy vision.118 Another of Arnulf ’s friends, a secular woman, received a “wondrous grace” that lasted almost the whole of Good Friday. Being of one heart and soul with her, Arnulf miraculously perceived all her tears, visions, and locutions and knew exactly how long the grace remained in her soul—as his messenger reported to her in detail. The woman was “filled with amazement.”119 Ida of Gorsleeuw could discern the spiritual state of communicants. Watching her sisters approach the altar, she saw God coming to some gladly but to others reluctantly, and even an angel descending to “rescue” Christ from the mouth of an unworthy communicant.120 In a Christmas vision, Ida of Nivelles perceived a clerical friend singing Mass at a church a day’s journey away. When she saw a pillar of fire descending on the priest’s head, she knew he was tasting a delicious, honeyed savor—a grace he confirmed when she told him about her vision.121 Even more remarkably, through clairvoyance the same Ida witnessed the episcopal consecration of virgins at Maagdendaal, where her beloved Beatrice lived. In a rush of pentecostal fervor, every single nun fell into ecstasy that day. But even though “swooning had come upon each of them, it occurred to different individuals in different times and places, coming either during the ceremony or afterwards; and Ida was able to tell, in orderly fashion, the location of each one’s swooning.”122 Conveniently, a lay brother from Maagdendaal soon came to La Ramée and confirmed this report. Despite the nuns’ impressive solidarity in devotion, one has to wonder what the bishop thought. For every Jacques de Vitry who rejoiced in this new outpouring of the Spirit, there must have been many a prelate who grumbled about disorderly, hysterical women. Telepathy, clairvoyance, and intercessory prayer converge in these tales. A saint can witness the inner experiences of friends only because she or he is already present to them in prayer. Even today, when we are unable to attend a friend’s wedding or some other significant event, we say, “I’ll be there in spirit.”

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But for thirteenth-century saints, “being there in spirit” had a literal force. It might entail visions, “sending God,” or telepathic access to the thoughts of others. Such tales defy our cultural assumption that visions are subjective experiences, the products of imagination or autosuggestion. In fact, that commonsense assumption was shared by many in the Middle Ages, including some clerics. Simon of Aulne’s biographer mentions a lay brother who thought his “prophecies” were just lucky guesses, as well as a priest who worried that Simon read consciences with the help of demons.123 The literature on discernment of spirits often evinces profound skepticism about visionary experience and alleged supernatural graces.124 Goswin of Villers, Thomas of Cantimpré, and other hagiographers expect their readers to be amazed and skeptical; that is why they go to such lengths to present corroborating evidence. It is amusing, Cawley writes, “to watch how, at one moment, [Goswin] will bid us marvel at what he is saying, and the next dismiss it as ‘small wonder!’ ”125 These writers are doing their best to inculcate what Luhrmann calls a Christian theory of mind, an epistemology in which minds are not private and persons are not always visible. (Conversely, they may be fully visible to the spirit, though distant in the flesh.) The phenomenon of joint visions confirms that such graces are not merely subjective; sent by God, they are objective realities. More important, they create a realm of sacred intersubjectivity in which two people, without proximity or language, can share the same inner experience. The medieval diocese of Liège, like modern Belgium, was bisected by the French/Dutch language boundary.126 While some anecdotes feature mind reading without words, others show that the charism is not impeded by linguistic difference. A devout Dutch-speaking matron, Lady Mechthild of Schmithausen, knew of Simon of Aulne by reputation and earnestly desired to meet him. So the francophone Simon came to visit with an interpreter. He needed no language, however, to read Lady Mechthild’s mind. As the lady later recounted to Caesarius, “He told me whatever I was thinking”—even though his words were French and her thoughts were presumably Dutch.127 Lutgard, as we have seen, left the Dutch-speaking community where she was first professed for a francophone house. Through she entered Aywières at twenty-four and lived there for forty years, Thomas of Cantimpré claims that “she could barely learn more French than she needed to ask for bread”—a linguistic deficit that seems to him “miraculous.”128 He even credits the Virgin Mary with shielding Lutgard from any knowledge of French—so that she could escape administrative office and remain free for contemplation. Her case may, however, have been more strategic. Long afterward, a desperate laywoman who spoke only French came to

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Aywières in search of counsel. None of the other nuns could help her, so Lutgard took her aside for a long colloquy, much to her sisters’ amusement. But at last the woman, much comforted, asked the nuns, “Why did you say that this most holy lady was Flemish (teutonica)? Indeed, I have found by experience that she is quite French!”129 Did Lutgard read the lady’s mind, or did the Virgin temporarily release her from the ban? More likely, she had by then acquired enough passive command of French that, at a time of urgent need, she managed to speak it.130 Be that as it may, both tales are recorded to show that in God the capacity of one mind to commune with another does not depend on language. Some of the most challenging tales concern the social dimension of rapture, in which participants “send God” so as to meet in God outside the ordinary space-time continuum. A story about Arnulf of Villers sheds light on both interiority and concrete social relations. A woman named Theophania, who ran a hostel for Brabantine students at Notre-Dame in Paris, heard from them about the extraordinary merits of Brother Arnulf. When she learned that he could send God to people, she eagerly engaged a student to bear him greetings, with a request that she too might benefit from that gift. Arnulf sent the messenger back with joy, promising that on a certain date, unless negligence stood in the way, she would “have from the heavenly Lord such an overflow of grace as she has never had in her whole life.”131 The grace arrived as promised, calling forth her profound gratitude and all Goswin’s eloquence. Thereafter, as students came and went, Theophania pressed many more into ser vice as envoys, thanking Arnulf for his suffrages even as she promoted his cult in Paris. Thus the two became fast friends without ever meeting. Among the students who crisscrossed the three hundred miles between Paris and Brabant, some might have gone on to become prominent clerics, while others perhaps returned to Villers or neighboring abbeys as monks. Goswin’s tale shows the surprising influence a laywoman could have at the university, helping to forge contacts between a lowly conversus and the intellectual world, while spreading the cult of a distant saint on whom she had never laid eyes. Though living persons are rarely named in Vitae, Goswin makes an exception for Theophania, suggesting that doubters might “interrogate her for themselves” because “she is still alive and is in the city of Paris to this day.” As Martinus Cawley notes, this remark implies a readership in the capital. Goswin could even have sent her a copy of his Vita Arnulfi for student use.132 Another of Goswin’s tales concerns Ida of Nivelles and a priest who had heard rumors of her sanctity but remained skeptical until God confirmed them in a vision. Even though the priest had visited Ida several times without striking sparks, after this vision he went to see her again but found her ill. As priest and

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nun gazed intently at each other in silence, both fell into simultaneous rapture. The priest awoke first and took leave of Ida’s companions, who asked with puzzlement why he had not stayed to talk with her. “I did speak to her and spoke to my heart’s content,” he replied, “though only in the honey-laden whisper used in heaven by the souls of the saints.” After the priest had departed, Ida too returned to herself and was asked the same question. She answered, “I did speak to him, quite as much as I pleased, up in heaven above!” What the nuns serving as chaperones must have seen—two entranced, silent bodies lying side by side— both suggests and occludes what the visionaries reported: the consummation of a spiritual love. Goswin describes their shared ecstasy as a “most restful sleep of love” during which the holy friends “mutually beheld one another and celebrated festivity together.”133 No physical contact occurs to imperil chastity or shock the witnesses. Spiritually, however, minds commune; each inhabits the awareness of the other. “Heaven” is the name both give to the virtual space of their meeting, which they will not profane with mere words. Another of Ida’s priest friends was chatting one day with the abbess of Maagdendaal, Beatrice’s convent. Suddenly, much to the abbess’s surprise, he fell into rapture. When he regained his senses he exclaimed, “Had I bow and arrow at hand, I’d shoot her back for shooting me!” Quizzically, the abbess wondered what he meant, and he explained that Lady Ida had just received Communion and passed into ecstasy “as usual.” During her rapture she offered “the sweet utterance of a devoted prayer” for the priest, who promptly joined her in mystic vision. No sooner had he spoken these words than his rapture resumed. This time he had a vision of Christ telling Ida to share the grace he had “allotted so abundantly and gratuitously” to her. Still in this visionary space, Ida and the priest now exchanged a holy kiss—“a pressing of spirit to spirit, not of mouth to mouth.”134 As a result, the priest was granted a share in Ida’s capacious measure of grace and divine knowledge (modum gratiae et cogitationis ad Deum). Never in his life, he told the abbess, had he experienced so full a grace; no sermon, no holy text, no Mass, no prayer, could equal the depth of this encounter with God. Feeling a need to confirm his tale, the abbess sent a messenger to La Ramée and found that Ida had indeed been entranced that day. As in the previous anecdote, the language of fin’amor is conspicuous: arrows of love, honeyed kisses. Was it Goswin, the priest, the abbess, or all three who used such language? Whatever his informants told him, the hagiographer saw clear parallels between the world of secular romance and the sacred romance that cast a rosy glow over his tales. A similar, even stranger experience is reported about Elisabeth of Spalbeek, the trance performer. After his account of her Passion play, Philip of Clairvaux

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adds a miracle to bolster his case for Elisabeth’s holiness. One day, when another abbot wondered how she could bear her physical pain, the holy woman said her sufferings were nothing compared to those of another virgin, the anchoress Marie of Lille. She then described Marie’s tortures in detail, adding that she was a “very wise girl.” Asked how she knew this anchoress who lived so far away, Elisabeth said their raptures often coincided, so in consequence they had come to know each other well.135 To clinch the miracle, Philip claims that the abbot who told him this story had never heard of Marie, but he himself “had often visited her,” so he could verify Elisabeth’s report. As it happens, Marie’s patron was no less a personage than King Louis IX, who had built her chapel, so this anchoress must have been a person of some renown.136 A skeptic would note that one of Elisabeth’s many visitors could have brought news of her. But Philip explicitly denies this, insisting that she “had never seen [Marie] nor heard anything about her from any mortal.” Even if the holy women had first “met” through hearsay, however, the miracle remains. Like Ida of Nivelles and her priests, Marie and Elisabeth converse in spirit, not only without speaking, but even without physically meeting at all. The torments of one woman’s body appear plainly to the other’s soul. Philip of Clairvaux, the recorder of this tale, shares a fascinating assumption with Goswin and others of their milieu. The saints, when raptured, do not simply rest in the presence of God, nor do they cast all creatures beneath a cloud of forgetting. Rather, they are lifted into an eminently social realm where they taste the coinherence and blissful exchange of heaven. Witnesses to such liminal moments would have seen only a person in extremis, a body taut with agony or rapt in ecstasy. Yet, precisely when the body is incapacitated, the soul can escape its limits to enjoy a fuller, more blessed communion with others than ordinary life permits. Not only could living saints “meet in heaven” during their trances, Jesus and Mary themselves were happy to serve as their go-betweens. As if to prove that nothing is impossible in this hagiographic world, Lutgard of Aywières even used a demon as her messenger. She had been praying for one of her sisters, “a very religious nun” who had been deceived by false revelations. Lutgard’s urgent prayers compelled a demon to appear before her and admit that he was the “lying spirit” responsible for the deception. So Lutgard uttered a prayer of command: “Go to Brother Simon who lives at the monastery of Aulne and tell him also, that I might have a witness to the truth.”137 Sure enough, the demon obeyed, and Simon promptly came at his summons. Together, Lutgard and Simon then sent for the nun, who began to exhibit physical symptoms of possession, and they performed a successful exorcism. Thomas of Cantimpré says Lutgard wanted a “witness” to the event, though she probably also wanted to

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bolster her strength against the demon. But if she was powerful enough to send the evil spirit as her envoy, why couldn’t she just exorcise him herself?138 The answer may be that her telepathic connection with Simon is just as important as the afflicted nun’s deliverance. In a thought-world so utterly saturated with the supernatural, it may seem pointless to choose between more and less likely explanations. Still, the notion that Lutgard telepathically transmitted her thought to Simon, who expertly received it, may be marginally more plausible than a demon physically performing her embassy. We will never know what “really happened,” but the text strongly emphasizes the social nature of the miracle. At least five persons are involved: blessed sister, holy brother, God, demon, victim. We might as well add Thomas of Cantimpré as a sixth, for he must have heard this tale (perhaps in confession) from one of the principals.139 Unlike the anecdotes about hidden sins, mind reading in the context of special grace serves no clear ideological purpose beyond the obvious: all hagiographic miracles reveal a saint’s holiness. But tales in this category have at least two other theological functions. First, they very often involve friendships between a priest or lay brother and a religious woman. Jacques de Vitry, Marie d’Oignies, Ida of Nivelles, Arnulf of Villers, Simon of Aulne, Lutgard of Aywières, Margaret of Ypres, Friar Zeger, and Ida of Leuven, as well as many anonymous priests, an anchoress, and a few secular matrons, all figure in tales of cross-gender mind reading. Friendships between clerics and devout women were legion—but they were also fraught. Warnings that “spiritual” love can easily slip into the carnal sort are not only ancient and pervasive; they are ubiquitous in this very corpus. Second, in a religious milieu fascinated with inner prayer, tales of telepathy suggest just how intercession might work, developing a new theology of prayer out of a deep interest in persons-in-relation. Just to review the tales we have examined, Lutgard is deeply troubled by Jacques de Vitry’s “all too human” love for an unnamed religious woman. Ida of Nivelles counsels a novice who has slept with a priest. An anchoress friendly with Simon of Aulne tries to distance herself from a student who has a crush on her. Yvette of Huy worries that one of her girls is distracted by a good-looking cleric as she receives Communion. Darker anecdotes in her Life concern lustful priests: one has slept with his mistress in church, while another seduces a matron who frequents his church for prayer. Arnulf of Villers, asked to reveal the sins of two clerics, tells one to stop attending the colloquies of religious women in order to flirt with them.140 The youthful Lutgard, scandalized by an abbot who tries to give all the nuns a “kiss of peace” during his visitation, earns ridicule from her sisters for resisting. In her defense, Thomas of Cantimpré launches into an angry

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rant against priests who take such liberties: “Alas! May that contemporary devotion, more disgraceful than blind, blush for shame whereby men ‘who have the outward appearance of piety’ think they can kiss women and virgins with impunity. . . . Is it not the outward appearance of evil when corruption of souls follows through the contact of bodies? And is it the corruption of minds alone or of bodies as well?”141 It is no contradiction to find, in the same sources, profound anxieties about cross-gender friendships as well as tales in which God himself validates them through miraculous mind reading. For the very priests most sympathetic to religious women—the ones most likely to hear their confessions, marvel at their visions, seek their advice, and write their Vitae—would have been the ones in greatest danger. I speak not of the proverbial wolves in sheep’s clothing, who deliberately set out to seduce women, but of genuine friends. Just as boys posed a sexual hazard for men in the eleventh-century schools, permeated with an ethos of teacher adoration, so did devout women threaten priests in this more heterosocial environment. Thirteenth-century developments in sacramental theology fostered a new adoration of priests, now firmly distinguished from the laity by their (notional) celibacy and their awesome powers to consecrate and absolve. On the other hand, a different kind of awe began to crystallize around charismatic women, whose ecstasies inspired some priests to admire and even envy the women’s spousal closeness to God.142 Such mutual awe, admiration, and affection, nurtured by intimate spiritual conversations—including confession itself—could and did result in deep friendships.143 But a relentless insistence on chastity for both priests and women all but guaranteed the constant pressure of sexuality, and the more intense the friendship, the stronger the pull. In this context, stories about Ida of Nivelles’s shared ecstasies with priests, Lutgard of Aywières’s telepathic exchange with Simon of Aulne, or Ida of Leuven’s divinely mandated love for a canon, show that these relationships are truly in God, nurtured by his miraculous gifts. Jacques de Vitry tells several such tales about his friendship with Marie d’Oignies, as Thomas of Cantimpré does about his spiritual mother, Lutgard. Interestingly, one story in the Vita Lutgardis concerns Thomas’s role as a confessor designated to absolve penitents of the most serious sins, normally reserved for the bishop. Many of these were sexual, and Thomas struggled with the impulses he felt when hearing especially lurid confessions. But the holy prayers of Lutgard, a woman he loved in the spirit, delivered him from that temptation once and for all.144 Margaret of Ypres, afraid that her love for Friar Zeger might be excessive, tries to find the strength to give him up if Christ should request it—but instead, he reassures her that their affection is wholly proper.145 When Simon visits a friend of his, a nun in Maubeuge, she “accidentally

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[falls] into his lap,” injuring him—but he prays to “God, the lover of chastity,” to heal his wound “by the merit of virginity.”146 Beatrice of Nazareth is anxious about one of her friendships, but during an ecstasy at the elevation of the host, she perceives that God “took delight in the union of her spirit with that of her friend, that he delightedly approved of it.”147 The intimacy of reading someone else’s inmost thoughts, especially when she or he was rapt in a eucharistic vision or a celestial conversation with Christ, supplied an absolute guarantee that the relationship was one of chaste dilectio or sacred caritas—not ambiguous, slippery amor. Yet many more tales concern friendships or mentoring ties between women, which were not suspect. So the rationale I have outlined cannot exhaust the purpose of these anecdotes. As I will argue, both the woman-to-woman and the cross-gender tales about mind reading have a deeper theological aim: to sketch a theory of intercessory prayer. Almost instinctive to those who believe in a deity, intercession figures so often in the Bible that few have felt a need to “explain” it. If a model were required, the one medieval sources most often used is asking a powerful king for a boon. Prayer to Mary and the saints is sometimes justified as seeking mediation through the queen or a well-positioned courtier, who can approach the king more boldly than a mere subject. Jesus on the other hand recommends appealing to God with confidence, reminding his disciples, “Your Father knows what you need before you ask him” (Matt. 6:8). But in that case, why ask? The usual answer is that prayer fosters an intimate relationship with God, while intercession furthers charity among those who pray. But the Vitae we are exploring, with their passionate interest in interiority, offer a more theologically sophisticated answer. Miraculous mind reading provides a way to show how intercession works, whether the context is pastoral counseling, friendship, eucharistic devotion, rapture, or even exorcism. When one person prays for another, she or he does not simply ask a distant God to do a favor for a third party. Nor do these prayer specialists seem very much like courtiers approaching a king. No one shows a more thoughtful interest in this subject than Goswin, the hagiographer of Arnulf, Abundus, and Ida of Nivelles. Here he explains how Ida discerned the secrets of hearts: Charitas enim eam interius ad cerae similitudinem liquefactam per excessum ad superna emittebat. Et eadem charitas illam deorsum retrahebat, ut positis in tribulationibus compati studeret et misereri. Charity first inwardly melted her, like wax; then it upwardly released her, in a transport, to see visions and revelations of the Lord; until

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finally back down again it shrank her, for her to strive to compassionate those in trouble and show them mercy.148 The text describes a three-part process with charitas, the subject of both sentences, as the agent. As Ida begins to pray, moved by charity, she is “inwardly melted like wax,” a familiar image for the soul liquefied by love. By this means her mind is united with God, enabling her to ascend into heaven (ad superna) in ecstasy (per excessum) “to see visions and revelations.” These concern the inner states of her prayer clients: their hidden sins, temptations, devout longings, visions, or besetting demons. In this way, Goswin specifies, “the capacity of her mind opened up wider than its natural limit, and her understanding was wafted along by divine inspiration . . . beyond the dimensions, not only of this person or that, but of human nature in general and of all human craft.”149 It is prayer— offered with sufficient love by a mystically, prophetically gifted subject—that precipitates rapture, which in turn enables miraculous mind reading. But this ecstatic ascent has to be completed by a compassionate descent. The purpose of the gift is fulfilled in acts of mercy, whether pastoral counseling or “sending God” to like-minded friends. Other anecdotes suggest, as a matter of course, that revelations will come during prayer. Sometimes these involve images relating to the client. Ida, we recall, learned of a novice’s sin with a priest through a vision of toads coupling. Marie d’Oignies is asked by a friend if he should accept a prestigious job offer. Praying, she sees him ready to mount “a black horse . . . which neighed on its way to hell to the accompaniment of applause from . . . demons.”150 (The answer is no.) In his contemplation, Simon of Aulne sees an enormous man weakened by a “putrid brain” and knows him to be the pope, entangled in hidden sins.151 Yvette sees fire blazing out of a sinful woman’s genitals and realizes that she will be stricken with leprosy.152 But on other occasions, the rapture precedes the prayer: a saint falls into ecstasy and then remembers a friend, perhaps “sending God” or precipitating a joint rapture. Often such ecstasies occur at the elevation of the host or after Communion (which the medieval laity received after Mass, not during it). As the material body of Christ, the host is the meeting place of his whole mystical body. All the faithful are spiritually present at the consecration, where the boundaries of time and space dissolve and all minds lie open to one another in the mind of God. This therefore is the ideal place for intercessory prayer and the supernatural meeting of minds that it fosters. I have presented a long series of unlikely miracles, all of them sharply challenging to modern assumptions. Many, I have suggested, challenged medieval

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assumptions as well. As Luhrmann observes, our belief that “minds are private” is deeply ingrained and hard for anyone (Christian or other wise) to resist. As with any miraculous account, the reader is free to search for naturalistic explanations, suspect the reporters of self-deception or fraud, or simply disbelieve the recorded events. Nevertheless, there is no doubt that a wide swath of the medieval public not only believed but delighted in such tales. Speaking of late antiquity, Paul Dilley even suggests that miraculous mind reading (which he calls “cardiognosticism”) accounted for much of the pleasure to be found in hagiography: “The reader shares in [a saint’s] experience of cardiognosticism, gaining a privileged access to the saint’s mind as he or she practices the care of souls.”153 The saint, of course, already has a privileged access to other minds. Such authors as Goswin, Thomas of Cantimpré, and Philip of Clairvaux understood this privilege as a byproduct of habitual communion with the divine mind. I do not wish, however, to leave the impression that this was merely the arcane belief of a few esoteric hagiographers. On the contrary, it was shared by at least one widely read vernacular poet, a layman, famous for this-worldly concerns. For a fuller account of mind reading and its significance, therefore, I turn to Dante’s Commedia.

Dante: Telepathy as a Celestial Way of Life Medieval theologians liked to speculate on the nature of heaven, yet few tried to picture its social life. Dante stands almost alone in his rich imagining of the blessed community, and one of the more striking features of his Paradiso is that the saints can read the pilgrim’s mind. Indeed, telepathy turns out to be the standard means of communication between saint and pilgrim. Even Virgil, who is not saved, shows that he can read Dante’s mind at several points in the Inferno and Purgatorio.154 If the concrete imagining of this spiritual communion is original with Dante, the idea itself is not. In fact, it was adumbrated by Augustine at the end of The City of God. Discussing the beatific vision, the bishop speculates that the blessed will see God not only in himself but in one another as well: “Perhaps God will be known to us . . . in the sense that he will be spiritually perceived by each one of us in each one of us, perceived in one another, perceived by each in himself.” As a corollary, “the thoughts of our minds will lie open to mutual observation.”155 Although none of our thirteenth-century Vitae cites this passage, it would be surprising if the hagiographers did not know it. Telepathy also figured in a scholastic discourse about prayer to the saints. Since blessed souls live beyond the range of

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human speech, such prayer makes sense only if they can read the minds of devotees. Gregory the Great asserted in his Moralia in Job that “because the holy souls . . . inwardly behold the glory of almighty God, they should by no means be thought ignorant of anything outside it.”156 Thomas Aquinas used the pope’s authority to buttress his argument that the saints have full knowledge of our wishes, prayers, and devotions. Even if they are not omniscient, it pertains to their beatitude as our helpers to know all that they need to know about us.157 In this respect, blessed souls are like angels, for whom (according to Thomas) “only internal speech is appropriate.”158 Agreeing with the Angelic Doctor, Dante explained in De vulgari eloquentia that angels need no language, for “one reveals itself totally to another, either through itself or through that resplendent mirror in which all are reflected in their beauty, and all most eagerly gaze.”159 The “resplendent mirror” is the mind of God. By analogy with angelic knowledge, Dante imagined the telepathy of the blessed, who also see “in that truthful mirror / which makes itself reflective of all else / but which can be reflected nowhere else” (nel verace speglio / che fa di sé pareglio a l’altre cose, / e nulla face lui di sé pareglio, Par. 26.106–8).160 The poet chooses a deeply significant moment to introduce his theme of celestial mind reading. Beatrice has read the pilgrim’s thoughts from the outset; Dante says she knows him as well as he knows himself (ella, che vedea me sì com’ io, 1.85). But he waits to provide a full exposition of the theme until the pilgrim has reached the third heaven, the heaven of Venus. There he meets Folco of Marseille (1150–1231), a famous ecclesiastical figure also known as Folquet de Marselha or Fulk of Toulouse. Folco had begun his career as a troubadour, one whom Dante admired as a fellow singer of love. After a religious conversion in 1195, he became a Cistercian and in 1205 was made bishop of Toulouse. In that post he vigorously supported the Albigensian Crusade, thereby earning the hatred of his diocese. Folco attended the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, and it was to him that Jacques de Vitry dedicated his Life of Marie d’Oignies, with its prologue of fulsome praise for the beguines. Dante accosts this still-unidentified spirit with a remark that is half playful ribbing, half ontology of love. In lines translated by Robert and Jean Hollander with desperate literalism, the pilgrim wonders why Folco did not answer his question even before he asked it: “Dio vede tutto, e tuo veder s’inluia,” diss’io, “beato spirto, sì che nulla voglia di sé a te puot’ esser fuia. Dunque la voce tua . . .

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perché non satisface a’ miei disii? Già non attendere’ io tua dimanda, s’io m’intuassi, come tu t’inmii.” (Par. 9.73–76, 79–81) *** “God sees all, and your sight is so in-Himmed, blessèd spirit,” I said, “that no wish of any kind is able to conceal itself from from you. “Why then does your voice . . . “not offer my desires their satisfaction? I would not await your question if I in-you’d me as you in-me’d you.” John Sinclair assures us that the string of neologisms—s’ inluia, m’ intuassi, t’ inmii—sound every bit as strange in Italian as they do in English. By transforming personal pronouns into verbs with the prefix “in,” Dante coined a fresh and startling idiom for the coinherence promised in John’s Gospel: “In that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you” (John 14:20). Such language, Sinclair writes, denotes “a mystery that cannot be told in common speech, no loss of personality but the fulfilment of it in an immediacy of intercourse, thought with thought, which belongs to the life of Paradise.”161 Only in the heaven of Venus, the planet of love, do we learn that this art of seeing-in-God is the prerogative of all the blessed. One of the earliest commentators offers further insight. Johannes de Serravalle, who translated the whole Commedia into Latin (1416–17), renders these lines in a way that differs from modern versions but comes closer to our thirteenth-century saints’ Lives. Deus videt totum, et tuum videre illuminatur, idest intrat, sive penetrat, in eum, scilicet Deum, . . . ita quod nihil voluntatis illius, idest nulla voluntas eius, Dei, tibi potest esse absconsum; idest, tu vides que Deus vult, intuendo in eum.162 God sees all, and your sight is illumined—that is, enters or penetrates—into him, into God, . . . so that nothing of his will—that is, no wish of his (of God)—can be hidden from you. That is, you see what God wills by gazing on him.

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For this Franciscan commentator, voglia di sé in Par. 9.75 refers specifically to God’s will, a point he makes emphatically with his triple repetition of illius, eius, Dei. What Folco and, by extension, any blessed soul sees in the “resplendent mirror” of the divine mind is que Deus vult, “what God wills,” and souls possess that sight by virtue of the beatific vision. It is only by gazing on God that one blessed spirit reads the mind of another: Iam ego non expectarem tuam petitionem, si ego me intuarem, sicut tu immearis; idest, si ego essem in te, sicut [tu] es in me, idest si ego scirem quid tu velles, sicut tu scis et vides in me quid ego volo; vel si ego scirem intrinseca tua, sicut tu scis mea. I would not await your request if I in-you’d myself as you in-me yourself; that is, if I were in you as you are in me; that is, if I knew what you wished as you know and see in me what I wish; or if I knew your inner thoughts as you know mine. Serravalle painstakingly unpacks Dante’s lines from the same perspective adopted by Goswin and our other hagiographers. What he finds in the poet’s paradisal vision is the same assurance that justifies the saints’ miraculous mind reading—the eschatological promise of John 14:20. “In that day,” the day of eternal glory, all blessed spirits will be mutually “in-you’d” and “in-me’d” because all will be fully “in-Himmed.” The encounter between Dante and Folco falls short of that mutuality only because Dante is still a pilgrim, while Folco is already in patria. Other passages throughout the Paradiso draw recurrent attention to the theme while bringing out further nuances. In Paradiso 8, even before the Folco passage, Dante converses with Charles Martel (d. 1295), a son of Charles II of Naples. The youthful prince’s recent death had dashed Dante’s hopes, so his bitter earthly disappointment heightens his need to express celestial joy over Charles’s fate. After a warm greeting from the prince, despite a grim political prophecy, Dante responds: “Però ch’i’ credo che l’alta letizia che ’l tuo parlar m’infonde, segnor mio, là ’ve ogne ben si termina e s’inizia, per te si veggia come la vegg’ io, grata m’è più; e anco quest’ ho caro perché ’l discerni rimirando in Dio.” (Par. 8.85–90)

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*** “Since I sense that the deep joy your words have filled me with, my lord, is seen by you as clearly as it’s seen by me there where every good begins and ends, my joy is greater. And I also hold it dear that you discern this as you gaze on God.” Here coinherence in God takes the form of mirrored and thus multiplied joy. Charles’s words have gladdened Dante, and the prince “sees” the other’s joy by gazing on God (rimirando in Dio). This in turn deepens the joy of the pilgrim because he now perceives that it is shared. In addition (anco), Dante gains a new cause of rejoicing: he sees that this mirroring is a facet of the beatific vision in which he too will partake. The pilgrim’s encounter with Charles fulfills what is adumbrated by the shared ecstasies of saints on earth, who can already “see” each other’s joy from afar because they see in God. Telepathy also has a narrative function in the Paradiso. To vary familiar patterns of dialogue from earlier in the poem, the pilgrim sometimes asks his questions outright but often waits for the blessed to read his thoughts, feeling too awed to speak. They encourage him to do so because, as St. Benedict says, if he could have seen “the charity burning in our midst” (la carità che tra noi arde, 22.32), he would not have feared. Beatrice sees even Dante’s silence in God (il tacer mio, 21.49), along with his unspoken wish, and bids him give it voice. Others who read his mind include Thomas Aquinas (11.19–21), his ancestor Cacciaguida (15.55–63), St. John (25.122–23), and Adam (26.103–8). “You think your thoughts flow into mine,” says Cacciaguida, “through Him / who is the First” (Tu credi che a me tuo pensier mei / da quel ch’ é primo, 15.55–56)—and you are right, for in paradise both great and small “gaze into the mirror / in which before you think them, thoughts shine clear” (miran ne lo speglio / in che, prima che pensi, il pensier pandi, 55.62–63). Here Dante introduces the dimension of time, for the divine mind knows no before or after. Thus, for all who gaze in it, the thoughts of others are visible not only before they come to speech but before the thinker even becomes aware of them (prima che pensi). In a remarkable extension of that idea, Beatrice explains that the angels have no memory because they need none: gazing continually at the face of God, they perceive all things as perpetually present (29.76–81). This is another reason saintly mind reading is prophetic. It matters little whether a telepathic saint sees what others are now

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thinking, what they secretly thought in the past, or what they will think in the future. On one occasion celestial telepathy even has the prophetic function of shaming that it so often has on earth. A medieval folk tradition held that St. John the Divine had been raised bodily into heaven like Christ and Mary, so when the pilgrim meets the evangelist, he strains eagerly to discern a body. Although he says nothing, St. John perceives his erroneous thought and rebukes him—and the pilgrim is struck temporarily blind (25.118–29) Beyond these references to celestial mind reading, Dante creates a whole poetics of coinherence through his use of neologisms. Throughout the Paradiso he coins new verbs with the prefix “in.” For example, the Virgin’s perfection “inheavens” her (inciela, 3.97), each seraph “in-Gods itself” (s’ india, 4.28), and Dante “in-hers” himself (t’ inlei, 22.127) in beatitude—a feminine noun, l’ultima salute. Beatrice “imparadises” his mind (che ’mparadisa la mia mente, 28.3) in the place where joy becomes eternal, “in-forevers” itself (gioir s’ insempra, 10.148). All these neologisms refer to the same reality, the divine immersion that is the keynote of this canticle, culminating in the verbal pronouns we have already examined: s’ inluia, m’ intuassi, t’ inmii. Dante had clearly perceived the metaphysical weight of the New Testament in, which the Paradiso calls vividly to mind. As Ghino Ghinassi writes, his “poetics of the ineffable . . . seeks by varied means, among others these radical and sometimes violent verbal creations, to express concepts and sentiments that verge on the inexpressible.”163 For Charles Williams, the theologian par excellence of coinherence, there is a direct connection between Dante’s vision of celestial bliss and the intercession of saints on earth. “ ‘I will pray for you’ is a good saying; a better—‘I will pray in you.’ This indeed is like the . . . prayers for which the souls [in purgatory] are asking. Those on earth fulfil the necessary task. And now [in paradise] it is more than ritual prayers; it is the life and inter-life of souls.”164 Hagiographic tales of “sending God” and stories of the saints’ shared raptures anticipate this state. Even on earth the elect can temporarily spring free of the constraints of matter and read minds in the divine mind, just as the blessed do in paradise. This is exactly what Goswin of Villers meant when he wrote that Ida of Nivelles and her rapt friend conversed in “the honey-laden whisper used in heaven by the souls of the saints.”

Coda: Mind-Reading Priests in Modernity Though mind reading emerged as a major hagiographic theme soon after Fourth Lateran, it did not end with the Middle Ages. In fact, the saints most celebrated for

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that charism are both modern figures: Jean-Marie Vianney (1786–1859), better known as the Curé d’Ars, and Padre Pio (1887–1968). Despite their humble stature, these two priests achieved immense fame for their ability to read the conscience of penitents, who sought them out in droves for confession. Their Lives represent the culmination of a miracle type that first achieved prominence around 1215. Born three years before the French Revolution, Jean-Marie Vianney lived out his days as a country priest in a land convulsed by brutal assaults on the church. The scion of a traditional Catholic family, Vianney sensed an early call to the priesthood but barely squeaked through seminary because of his inability to master Latin. It was chiefly his poor academic record that resulted in his appointment to Ars, a remote commune of about 260 farmers, known for its religious indifference.165 What that parish needed, Vianney’s superiors thought, was not learning but fervor—and this the young priest had in abundance. Ardent in prayer and uncompromising in ascetic discipline, he gradually won the allegiance of his parishioners, though he faced bouts of hostility throughout his career. By 1827, when the curé was just past forty, his tiny village was already receiving about twenty pilgrims a day—some devout, some merely curious. By 1845 that number had increased to somewhere between three and four hundred a day, coming chiefly to make confessions.166 To accommodate them all, Vianney maintained a punishing schedule. Rising for prayer at 1 a.m., he heard women’s confessions through the night until 6 a.m., when he celebrated Mass and mingled with pilgrims and parishioners. At 8 a.m. he took a spartan breakfast of half a cup of milk, then heard men’s confessions from 8:30 until 11, when he squeezed in a catechism class before lunch. His afternoons were spent in visits to the sick and still more confessions, always segregated by sex. This discipline was punctuated only for Vespers and Compline. His routine never ended before 10 p.m., allowing Vianney three hours of sleep at most. Four times he tried to run away from Ars, vainly hoping to become a monk, but was never allowed to get far. What was it that drew people from all over Enlightenment France to insignificant Ars? It was less his counsel, which was often brief, than the authority with which Vianney seemed to read hearts and minds. Harshly rebuking those who refused to wait their turn in line, he might conversely leap out of the confessional to tell some disheveled stranger with little time to come at once. He did not hesitate to inform frivolous penitents that they were damned or to deny Communion to those who had not fasted as church discipline required. No one could explain how he identified them, but he was never wrong. According to George Rutler, his most recent biographer, Vianney’s sacristan “got used to being sent into the square in search of individuals described as wearing such-and-such by the Saint, who

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could not have seen them. A stranger confessed that he had not been to confession for thirty years; the Curé corrected him: ‘Thirty-three.’” After doing the math on the church wall, the man had to admit that Vianney was right.167 Another pilgrim came to Ars in mourning for her husband, who had committed suicide—a mortal sin—by drowning. Vianney sought her out in the crowd and reassured her before she could say a word: “Do not worry. Between the bridge and the water your husband repented and made an act of contrition. Pray for him.”168 The curé once refused absolution to a socialite, saying that confession would be useless: “I can read your soul, and there I see two devils that enslave it, the devil of pride and the devil of impurity. I can only absolve you on condition that you do not go back to Paris and, seeing your dispositions, I know that you will return there.” But he added that she would eventually move back to her villa in the south (which he described in detail to confirm his prophecy), and there she would receive grace to repent. All this took place as Vianney had predicted.169 Enthusiasts who wanted the saint to validate their religious vocations often left disappointed; yet a man who brought his shotgun and hunting dog to avoid seeming pious was so transformed that he became a Trappist monk.170 Vianney never received ecclesiastical advancement, and if he had, he would probably have refused it. But in 1925 he was canonized by Pius XI, who named him the patron saint of parish priests. A century later, the controversial Padre Pio (canonized in 2002) showed a remarkably similar profile. Like Vianney, he was born to a devout peasant family and received little education. Just as the Curé d’Ars had embodied traditional Catholic values during the French Enlightenment, Padre Pio proved that the church was alive and well—still working miracles—in Fascist and Communist Italy. At fifteen he joined the Capuchins, a branch of the Franciscan order. Like Vianney, Pio was distrusted by his superiors despite (or because of) his extreme piety, so they sent him to a remote village, San Giovanni Rotondo, where he would remain throughout his life. The supernatural aura that clung to Padre Pio, like a slap in the face of the modern church, constantly attracted both supporters and skeptics. He was repeatedly investigated and sanctioned, and for a year in 1921–22 he was even forbidden to say Mass in public or to hear confessions. Not only was he a stigmatic, his chief claim to fame; the range of his reported miracles would have made the most zealous medieval hagiographer proud. These included bilocation, healings, levitation, survival for long periods without sleep or food (subsisting on the Eucharist alone), and the odor of sanctity even in his lifetime. He was reputedly able to send the perfume of his wounds wafting off to distant friends or devotees as a sign of his spiritual presence.171

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Second only to the stigmata, however, was his fame for miraculous mind reading. Like the Curé d’Ars, Pio adopted a ferociously ascetic schedule to hear the confessions of countless pilgrims, who sought him out in even greater numbers in an age of railroads and mass media. In 1967, a year before his death, he is supposed to have heard the confessions of about fifteen thousand women and ten thousand men, an average of almost seventy people a day.172 The saint’s prophetic gift included all the temporal aspects mentioned by Gregory the Great—past, present, and future. One of his intimates, the Irishman John McCaffery, writes that Padre Pio could tell him what he had privately thought the previous evening, knew his upcoming schedule without being told, and showed full awareness of his confidential conversations with others. Asked once to bless a stack of devotees’ envelopes and packages, as he customarily did, the friar blessed them all except one sealed envelope—which turned out to contain the lottery ticket of a well-known mafioso.173 The saint allegedly foreknew the assassination of a prominent politician and other such events. But the most impressive demonstrations of his gift took place in the confessional. One story tells of a “violent Communist” who had a habit of beating his wife. One night after he had viciously abused her, the saint appeared to him while bilocating and harshly scolded the man—who was admittedly drunk at the time. Shocked, he resolved to visit Padre Pio in the flesh. On actually meeting him, the same man, now sober, was so overwhelmed that he made a tearful, heartfelt confession. “At the end, when he pulled out his Communist Party membership card and asked Padre Pio to destroy it, he got the reply ‘Yes, I shall. But you have another of these cards in the drawer by the head of your bed. Destroy that too when you go home.’”174 At the other end of the moral spectrum, an overscrupulous woman decided to confess the sin of gluttony because she had eaten some figs the night before. But once she reached the confessional, she found that she had forgotten one of her sins. “That’s OK,” Padre Pio said. “Just a few figs.” Another woman, too terrified by the saint’s presence to utter a word, was astonished to hear him confess all her sins on her behalf, using the same words she had prepared beforehand. After someone asked Padre Pio to pray for a sick daughter, he replied, “And you are much sicker than your daughter.” Not at all, the parent protested, I am in excellent health—at which the priest inquired, “How can you be well if you have so many sins on your conscience? I see at least 32 of them.” On occasion the friar, like Lutgard and Simon of Aulne, displayed a miraculous gift of tongues. When an American woman confessed in English because she knew no other language, Padre Pio replied in the same tongue, although he had never learned it.175 These and many similar tales have created a lively folklore around the saint.

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Such stories descend directly from the medieval tale types recorded by such men as Caesarius of Heisterbach and Thomas of Cantimpré, but with a key difference. Padre Pio and the Curé d’Ars both flourished in a church under assault by aggressively secular ideologies. Their intensity, their ascetic fervor, and, above all, their miracles, shining out from remote peasant villages, brought thousands of lapsed Catholics back to the confessional. In this way they testified to the urgency and sanctity of penance, a sacrament for which the wider world by then had little use. Today they are venerated largely by traditionalist Catholics. By contrast, the saints featured in this chapter represented a new, cutting-edge spirituality in their day. The earliest Vita, that of Marie d’Oignies, was composed in 1215–16, immediately after Fourth Lateran. With their gift of miraculous mind reading, these thirteenth-century women and men glorified the same sacrament as it was first coming into universal use. In the long history of penance, then, they represent the first chapter in a tale that reaches a triumphant climax, if not a conclusion, with the two modern saints.

Chapter 3

Lovers Exchanging Hearts

A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you; and I will take out of your flesh the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. —Ezekiel 36:26 And as she slep, anonright tho hire mette How that an egle, fethered whit as bon, Under hire brest his longe clawes sette, And out hire herte he rente, and that anon, And dide his herte into hire brest to gon— Of which she nought agroos, ne nothyng smerte— And forth he fleigh, with herte left for herte. — Geoffrey Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde (ca. 1387) Suddenly a light from heaven shone round about her. In the midst of the light our Lord appeared, bearing in his sacred hands a human heart, ruby in colour and ablaze with light. All a-tremble at the advent of the Author of light, she fell to the ground. Our Lord approached her, opened her left side once more, and placed within it the heart which he was carrying. “See, my daughter Catherine,” he said, “a few days ago I took your heart from you; now, in the same way, I give you my own heart, by which you may live forever.” —Raymond of Capua, Life of Catherine of Siena (1385–95)

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Criseyde and Catherine of Siena belong to very different stories. But in the waning years of the fourteenth century they had a remarkably similar experience, or so their male chroniclers tell us. Dreaming of an exchange of hearts, Criseyde learns that she is already in love with Troilus, although her conscious mind denies it, while Catherine seals the union with Jesus that would lead her to sainthood.1 The exchange of hearts, a familiar motif in hagiography and romance, may seem one of the stranger marks of medieval alterity—a bizarrely material way to symbolize love, fidelity, or devotion. Lovers no longer speak this way, nor do the devout. Yet in one sense, narratives like Chaucer’s or Raymond of Capua’s should be more intelligible today than ever before. Imagine what a medieval reader would have made of this tale. An eighteen-year-old boy, a songwriter, is tragically killed in an auto accident. His heart is transplanted into an ailing girl the same age. More than a year later, the boy’s parents discover that he had predicted his own death in a song entitled “Danny, My Heart is Yours.” When the girl sees the boy’s picture, she recognizes in him the longtime lover who died to save her life: “I know he is in me and he is in love with me. He was always my lover, maybe in another time somewhere. How could he know years before he died that he would die and give his heart to me? How would he know my name is Danielle?”2 Whether dramatic or subtle, common or rare, the experiences of those who have undergone a literal change of heart suggest that, even in medical terms, the organ is far more than a muscle that pumps the blood. Understood in cultures around the world as the seat of life, soul, personality, and emotion, the heart remains the most frequent and symbolically charged metonymy for the whole person. The ancient idea of giving one’s heart to another takes on a new potency now that it has become physically possible. But in medieval texts sacred and secular, we already find hearts offered and exchanged, pierced and tortured, inscribed and devoured. What begins as a figurative expression—“my heart goes with you”; “you have stolen my heart”—evolves into a set of insistently material representations. Lyric poets send their hearts questing after resistant ladies, who take the organ hostage with a kiss. When forced to separate, couples pledge their loyalty by exchanging hearts, which may come back to them with alarming literalism. Mystics—always female—offer their hearts to Jesus and receive his in return, sometimes entering his body through the bloody wound in his side. Jealous husbands kill and excoriate their wives’ paramours, feeding their hearts to the ladies in a secret cannibal feast. On autopsy, a lover’s heart reveals the name or image of the beloved or, mutatis mutandis, the tokens of Christ’s Passion. Exchanging hearts is a compelling way to represent coinherence, that mysterious exchange by which one person’s life and love animate the body of

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another. The medieval heart, as Heather Webb puts it, “was meant to be promiscuous; the world rushed into it with every breath.”3 Conceived as more porous than the modern organ (much like Charles Taylor’s porous self), the heart readily admitted influences from without, such as divine and demonic forces, or the assault of Love’s arrows from the eyes of the beloved. In lyric, which anatomizes a singer’s feelings rather than a relationship, the heart’s quest is a one-way transaction. The male lover’s heart ventures into the liminal space between self and other, no longer “his” yet not accepted as “hers.” In that space the self becomes fragmented, the lover’s heart setting itself at odds with the “I” that speaks or the eyes that gaze. But in romance, as in saints’ Lives, the gift is mutual. One body lives by the strength of the other’s heart, so that the self is not fractured but exchanged, “he in her and she in him.”

Love as Fusion: “Becoming One” As late as the seventeenth century, John Donne could still write in “The Ecstasy” of that “abler soul” that arises “when love, with one another so / Interinanimates two souls” that it “makes both one, each this and that.”4 But the ancient ideal of love as fusion is no longer in vogue. Paradoxically, though we now have the capacity to transplant physical hearts, their metaphysical exchange unnerves us. Our psychology more often represents mature love as partnership, placing a premium on the maintenance of healthy ego boundaries. Their blurring or permanent dissolution is seen as neurotic, regressive, or codependent. In psychoanalytic terms, the experience of love as fusion is a dangerous reversion to infantile sexuality, to the pre-oedipal phase of symbiotic union with the mother.5 Like the psychic transformation of transplant patients, the metaphor of exchanging hearts can trouble us because it resists our deep belief in (and desire for) personal autonomy. The medieval ideal of “oneness” can indeed be self-destructive; it is no accident that so many of the great love stories are tragic. Yet the permeability of the self, figured by the interchanged hearts of lovers, could enrich identity as well as destroy it. The metaphor lent itself to a variety of outcomes—including the insistence that it is not “metaphor” at all. Nowhere is the ideal of love as fusion more creatively expressed than in an early twelfth-century correspondence from the Île-de-France. More than one hundred Latin letters survive, some complete but most in fragmentary form. Unfortunately, they are transmitted anonymously in a single fifteenth-century manuscript from Clairvaux, in which the writers are identified only as M[ulier]

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and V[ir]. As I have argued elsewhere, following an important study by Constant Mews, these are quite likely to be the “lost love letters” exchanged by Abelard and Heloise during their affair—an early correspondence mentioned by both lovers in their canonical exchange.6 While the attribution adds great interest, I will not insist on it now, because it is the language, rather than the historical identity, of these lovers that interests me here. Both, but especially the Man, use the idiom of coinherence and express it through the image of exchanging hearts. Pressed to define love, he begins by exemplifying it in his salutation, then proceeds to a scholastic definition: “To a soul brighter and dearer to me than anything earth has borne, from the flesh inspired and quickened by that soul: I send what I owe the one through whom I breathe and move. . . . Love, then, is a certain power of the soul, neither existing through itself nor selfcontained, but always pouring itself into another with a kind of appetite and desire, willing to become identical [idem] with the other so that, from two different wills, one single thing [unum quid] may be produced without difference [indifferenter].”7 The greeting itself asserts coinherence: the beloved woman is the soul, her lover the flesh inspired by that soul (reversing the conventional genders assigned to these parts). He vows allegiance to her in audacious terms that deliberately evoke the divine Spirit (Acts 17:28), which animates all flesh just as he says she animates his. Yet love, as he defines it, is a power of the soul rather than the flesh. Naturally overflowing into the other, it seeks a union not of bodies but of wills, again echoing theological language: “Whoever clings to the Lord becomes one spirit with him” (1 Cor. 6:17).8 Fused by love into one, two distinct wills become not a single will (which would take the feminine gender) but a single neuter “thing”—“each this and that,” in Donne’s words—“without difference.” Indifferenter, a key term in Abelard’s contested teaching on universals, implies concrete unanimity between the lovers: “We affirm and deny the same things, we have the same views about everything.”9 This definition is echoed in a later greeting with the lapidary elegance typical of early twelfth-century letters. Anime sue, anima eius, the Man writes: in una anima diu unum esse.10 “To his soul from her soul: may we long be one in one soul.” These philosophical lovers use the lexicon of hearts, souls, and bodies indifferently to convey their mutual indwelling. “I am wholly with you, and to speak more truly, I am wholly in you,” he writes.11 “When you departed,” she says, “I departed with you in spirit and in mind; nothing was left at home but my dull and useless body.”12 Elsewhere she bids “farewell, my heart and body and all my love.”13 But the Man stresses oneness and coinherence even more than his beloved does.

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“To his lily,” one greeting runs—“not the lily that fades but one that knows not how to change its fragrance, from her heart, who sends as much as he is worth, with all the strength of his body and mind.”14 He enjoys the casuistry of love’s paradoxes: “If there can be any alterity or division within the same body, then to the best part of his own body, which is divided from him, he wishes undivided, incorrupt, and integral affection, with unending sweetness of the liveliest love.”15 Here a hypothetical division of the lover’s body enables the beloved, as his heart or optima pars, to experience a new and higher integrity. In another passage he claims, “I hold you in my whole heart, I embrace you with my inner arms, and the more I drink of your sweetness, the more I thirst. All my riches have been gathered in you alone; all that I can do is yours. That we may do our best to care for each other, you are I and I am you.”16 Love’s idiom of fusion accepts as equivalent the formulas of partnership (totus tecum sum), indwelling (totus in te sum), and identity (ego sum tu).17 Interestingly, these formulas persist throughout the correspondence, despite some evidence of quarrels. We find ourselves in the riddling world of Donne’s “Ecstasy” or Shakespeare’s “Phoenix and the Turtle,” where “Single nature’s double name / Neither two nor one was called.”18 The heart image reaches a pitch of gothic intensity in one salutation. “You are immortally buried in my heart; from this tomb you shall never emerge while I live,” the Man writes. He goes on to echo the Song of Songs: “There you lie down, there you rest [cf. Cant. 1:6]. Until sleep comes you are with me; in sleep you do not forsake me; after sleep I see you as soon as I open my eyes, before the light of heaven itself. . . . Who then could deny that you are truly buried within me?”19 This striking figure is not unique to the “lost love letters.” René Nelli cites a similar image from The Ring of the Dove, an eleventh-century Arabic treatise on love by Ibn Hazm of Cordoba.20 In a twelfth-century Latin correspondence preserved at Tegernsee, a nun addresses her beloved male teacher as the one “I have enclosed in the marrow of my heart. . . . From the day I first saw you, I began to love you. You mightily penetrated the inner depths of my heart and there . . . you prepared yourself a seat.”21 As a flourish, she ends her Latin letter with a love strophe in the vernacular: Du bist min, ih bin din: des solt du gewis sin. du bist beslossen in minem herzen: verlorn ist daz sluzzellin: du muost och immer dar inne sin.

You are mine, I am yours: of this you may be certain. You are locked in my heart: the little key is lost: you must remain there forever.22

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While the Parisian letters are exceptional in their eloquence, they share with the Tegernsee correspondence and other twelfth-century texts the axiom that love seeks not mere partnership but union, coinherence, exchange of hearts—and thereby identities. In the rest of this chapter I explore the permutations of such exchange, beginning with the failed coinherence of lyric love. In romance, the motif was elaborated in the late twelfth century by Chrétien de Troyes and retained its hold for centuries, crossing linguistic boundaries to become an international convention. We find hearts exchanged in Gottfried von Strassburg’s Tristan, in the thirteenth-century Occitan romance of Flamenca, in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, and in the Roman du Castelain de Couci et de la Dame de Fayel, which introduces the macabre theme of the eaten heart. In hagiography, the exchange of hearts emerges at roughly the same time in Vincent of Beauvais’s Speculum historiale and Thomas of Cantimpré’s Life of his spiritual mother, Lutgard of Aywières (d. 1246), whom we have already encountered. Two mystics of Helfta, Gertrude the Great and Mechthild of Hackeborn, exchanged hearts with Jesus but also, implicitly, with each other. Their intertwined writings showcase the exchange in a communal context, giving us records of female intimacy unique in the Middle Ages. Conversely, the male hagiographers of Catherine of Siena and Dorothea of Montau preferred the romance model of a one-on-one exchange between the female mystic and her lover, Christ. But in sacred as well as secular tradition, a love pledge originating as a purely symbolic gesture refuses to confine itself to the realm of the symbolic. Instead, it reaches defiantly outward to touch material reality—even as, in today’s medical anecdotes, the physical gift of a heart reaches provocatively inward to leave its mark upon the soul.

The Heart Between Self and Other In the mythology of fin’amor, the heart under amorous provocation takes leave of the lover’s body. Wounded through the eyes by Love’s arrows or a lady’s gaze, divided against itself, ablaze with delicious pain or bitter joy, the heart goes to dwell with the domna, or perhaps she takes it captive with a kiss.23 Thus Bernart de Ventadorn laments that his lady has stolen his heart and left him nothing in return: Tout m’a mo cor, e tout m’a me, e se mezeis e tot lo mon;

She has it all: she took my heart, and me, and herself, and the whole world.

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And when she took herself away from me, she left me nothing but desire and a heart still wanting.

Embarking on crusade, the trouvère Conon de Béthune leaves his heart (cuers) in his lady’s dominion though his body (cors) goes to serve his Lord.25 Thibaut de Champagne compares his heart to a unicorn: just as the fabled beast falls fainting into a virgin’s lap, there to be slain by treachery, so his heart has leapt to his lady, who is now killing him.26 Gace Brulé rebukes both his “mad heart” and the lady who robbed him of it: En baisant, mon cuer me ravi ma dolce dame gente; trop fu fols quant il me guerpi por li qui me tormente. Las! ainz nel senti, qant de moi parti; tant dolcement lo me toli k’en sospirant lo traist a li; mon fol cuer atalente, mais ja n’avra de moi merci.27

My sweet gentle lady kissing me stole away my heart; it was crazy to quit me for her who torments me. Alas, I never felt it leaving me; she took it so gently, she drew it to her as I sighed; she covets my mad heart but will never have pity for me.

In another poem, the same trouvère proposes a remedy: if he has lost his heart with one kiss, perhaps another will restore it. Douce dame, por vostre signorie, Por vostre prix et por vostre valor, Se vos ameis ne pou ne bien ma vie, Vers vo bouche m’estuet reprendre un tour: Einsi vos pri ke mon cuer me rendeis.28

Sweet lady, by your lordship, by your worth and by your merit, if you care for me even a little, let me approach your mouth once again: that way, I beg you, return my heart to me.

Aggressively questing or helplessly captured, the lover’s tortured heart is a badge more of nobility than of relationship. It can hardly be other wise in the quintessential courtly lyric, since the canso’s signature theme is unrequited love. What may be most significant about the personified faculties of heart,

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will, reason, and desire, as Sarah Kay observes, is that the male lover has them, while the lady does not: “The domnas celebrated by these songs do not enjoy the pains or pleasures of an elaborated psychology.”29 If the lady too is fragmented, it is not spiritually but physically into body, face, eyes, and mouth. Hence the frequent pun whereby the lover is all heart (cor) and the lady all body (cors). The truant heart can then serve as an emissary from the lover’s “inside” world to the lady’s “outside.” This is true even in a Platonizing lyric by Dante’s friend Guido Cavalcanti where both hearts are mentioned. Broken by the scornful glance of the lady, the heart of the poet recovers with her smile until, gazing now on her virtues rather than her face, he feels “as if I had come into her heart” (sì com’ io fosse nello suo cor giunto).30 But the speaker’s interpretation of looks, smiles, and virtues remains in the realm of erotic fantasy, for the lady is mute as ever. As a trope of reciprocated love, the exchange of hearts occurs not in the canso but in a less common genre, the dawn song.31 These lyrics revolve around the parting of illicit lovers at dawn: a bird or watchman signals the rising sun, warning the lover to flee before the lady’s husband discovers him. Resisting the inevitable, the lovers curse the day, abuse the watchman, or desperately renew their embraces as the dangerous light increases. The exchange-of-hearts motif seems to have been a specialty of the German Tageliet.32 In a song by Ulrich von Winterstetten, it takes the form of a kiss, sealing a couple’s vow of fidelity: Owe und ach! der jamerbaeren scheiden ir beider herze brach, daz geschach von den gelieben beiden: daz schuof in ungemach. der ritter sprach “gehabe dich wol! din lip ist maniger tugende vol: min herze dir belibet hie.” si sprach “so füere min herze hin.” der wehsel da mit kus ergie.33

Woe and alas! the lamentable parting that separated the two lovers broke both their hearts; that caused them pain. The knight said, “take care of yourself! You are full of many virtues. My heart remains here with you.” She replied, “then let my heart go hence with you.” The exchange took place with a kiss.

Parting lovers exchange hearts along with rings or other symbolic objects to plight their troth.34 In another lyric, it is the watchman who proposes an exchange, urg-

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ing the reluctant knight to depart before day by promising that he can leave his heart behind, just as the lady will leave hers with him.35 Where the reality principle decrees separation, the exchange of hearts proclaims fusion.36 Though bodies must part, each goes its way as if animated by the other’s heart, the sign of inseparable love. An exchange of hearts must be enacted in dialogue or recounted by a third-person narrator, for it lies beyond the scope of the first-person canso. In effect, these dramatic dawn songs are miniature romance scenes. They also have an affinity with the pastorela, a lyric form in which a knight courts a shepherdess who talks back, either accepting or refusing him.37 A comic wooing dialogue by Ulrich von Lichtenstein lets the lady reject a proposed exchange of hearts: Frouwe, dâ soltû mich meinen herzenlîchen alse ich dich, unser zweien sô vereinen, daz wir beidiu sîn ein ich. wis du mîn, sô bin ich dîn. “herre, des mac niht gesîn. sît ir iuwer, ich bin mîn.”38

“Lady, you should think of me in your heart as I do of you, to unite the two of us so that both of us become one ‘I.’ If you were mine, so am I yours.” “Sir, that can never be! You be yours, for I am mine.”

Since the exchange of hearts is neither an emotion nor a mental state but an action, albeit symbolic, it is properly a narrative rather than a lyric theme. Only in romance, where the lover’s offered heart is received and reciprocated by the beloved, does the motif come into its own.

Exchanging Hearts in Romance From the late twelfth century on, the exchange of hearts is ubiquitous in romance. But, precisely because it seems so conventional, the motif has been little studied. One of the few scholars to have theorized it is René Nelli, who wrote extensively on Occitanian culture. For Nelli, the exchange of hearts originated as a symbolic substitute for the exchange of blood, which formed part of the ancient ritual of sworn brotherhood between warriors.39 Just as blood brotherhood transformed the warrior’s companion into an alter ego, the exchange of hearts transformed a woman, inferior by definition, into a friend and equal, and thus a being worthy of love. Grafted onto idealized male friendship, heterosexual

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love gained a dignity in European culture that it had not previously enjoyed, as C. Stephen Jaeger has shown on different grounds.40 Nelli understood the ritual exchange of hearts, solemnized with a kiss, as conferring an idealized androgyny on both partners: the woman is masculinized and the man feminized. Anne Callahan argues that by the very condition of desiring, which implies suffering lack, the male lover already participates in the feminine. By elevating a woman to the sovereign role of Lady and vowing submission to her, he makes her correspondingly virile.41 Indeed, the troubadours sometimes referred to their ladies in the masculine as midons (“my lord”). Through gender reversal and androgyny, the heterosexual couple attains what Nelli called “intersexual mutuality.” A touchstone for this theory, as for most grand theories of Western eroticism since Denis de Rougemont, is the Tristan legend—one of the earliest romances and the first to feature an exchange of hearts.42 Around 1170 Thomas of Britain wrote an influential French Tristan, most of which is lost; but it was the main source for Gottfried von Strassburg’s magisterial German version (ca. 1210), which has some claim to be the classic form of the romance. Curiously, Gottfried’s extant text breaks off at about the point where Thomas’s surviving fragment begins, so we can use a combination of the two to examine the motifs that concern us. Gottfried was indeed fascinated with androgyny, and his account of the doomed lovers sets out to explore what happens when a man and woman exchange not only hearts but also identities. The keynote is set in the prologue, which represents the lovers becoming each other: ein senedaere und ein senedaerîn, ein man ein wîp, ein wîp ein man, Tristan Isolt, Isolt Tristan.43

a loving knight, a loving queen, a man a woman, a woman a man, Tristan Isolt, Isolt Tristan. (vv. 128–30)

This amorous fusion is anticipated by Tristan’s parents, Rivalin and Blanchefleur, who impetuously fall in love at the court of Blanchefleur’s brother, King Mark of Cornwall. After an exchange of hearts, the lovers become as one person: si heten in ir sinnen beide eine liebe und eine ger. sus was er sî and sî was er, er was ir and sî was sîn; dâ Blanscheflûr, dâ Riwalîn,

they both had in their minds a single love, a single desire. Thus he was she and she was he, he was hers and she was his; there Blanchefleur, there Rivalin,

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there Rivalin, there Blanchefleur, there both, there loyal love. (vv. 1354–60)

One can imagine a performer miming this fusion with gestures to indicate that the man is now the woman, the woman the man; union in love trumps difference in sex. The lovers have achieved their ideal state of androgyny, though not for long. Gender difference is quickly reasserted when Rivalin dies in battle and Blanchefleur in childbirth. Tristan, their son, aspires to a like fusion with his uncle Mark’s wife, Isolt. The rhetoric of hearts is ubiquitous in their affair: among Tristan’s terms of endearment are herzefrouwe (lady of my heart), herzekünigîn (queen of my heart), and herzefriundîn (friend of my heart).44 But a formal exchange of hearts occurs only at their final parting, when Tristan swears his fidelity: lât mich ûz iuwerm herzen niht! wan swaz dem mînen geschiht, dar ûz enkumet ir niemer: Îsôt diu muoz iemer in Tristandes herzen sîn.

Let me never leave your heart! For whatever happens to mine, you will never depart from it: Isolt must forevermore dwell in Tristan’s heart. (vv. 18279–83)

Sealed with a sacramental kiss, the exchange signifies constancy until death. Perhaps surprisingly, however, Tristan fails the test. Gottfried’s version of the distressing close does not survive, so we must turn to Thomas for an account of Tristan’s marriage to Isolt’s double, called Isolt of the White Hands, and his fatal wounding in defense of his own double, Tristan the Dwarf. In an ingenious reading of this coda, Donald Furber and Anne Callahan argue that Tristan’s downfall springs from his self-deluding belief in the androgynous ideal implied by the exchange of hearts.45 He knows that Isolt loves only him, yet she must submit her body to her husband on demand. So, when Tristan meets another woman who happens to share both the name and the beauty of Isolt, he decides to cultivate the same experience as his beloved in order to learn how she feels. Could he too not give his body to one partner in marriage, while his heart belongs to another? il volt espuser la meschine pur saveir l’estre la reïne, coment se puisse delitier

He wishes to marry the maiden to understand the queen’s situation— to see how he might enjoy pleasure

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encontre amur od sa moillier. Assaier le volt endreit sei cum Ysolt fait emvers lu rei, e il pur ço assaier volt quel delit avra od Ysolt.46

with his wife in spite of love. He wants to experience for himself how Isolt behaves with the king; and that is why he wishes to test what pleasure he will have with [the other] Isolt. (vv. 411–18)

Through projection the knight has persuaded himself that, because of her supposed “pleasure” with Mark, Isolt has forgotten him, so he is also seeking revenge for an infidelity that exists only in his fantasies. But his experiment in androgyny falters on his wedding night. Brought to bed with the innocent Isolt of the White Hands, Tristan immediately repents his faithlessness and finds himself impotent. By imagining that his situation would be exactly parallel to his lady’s, he has forgotten the reality of sexual difference: Isolt need only surrender passively to Mark, while Tristan must, but cannot, perform actively as a male. His severely conflicted feelings hamper Tristan so far that he loses love and virility alike. After this point his degradation is swift and total. Tristan descends from erotic fulfillment with Isolt to a loveless marriage with her surrogate, and finally to a statue of Isolt that he commissions and courts, like a reverse Pygmalion, after losing the original. Having disastrously split the object of his love, he himself undergoes a psychological splitting that results in his encounter with Tristan the Dwarf, who has also suffered the loss of his lady. Although Tristan promises to rescue her, the Dwarf is killed in this battle, and Tristan himself receives a poisoned wound, of which he ultimately dies through the revenge of his still-virgin wife. Thus what began as the love triangle of Tristan, Isolt, and Mark becomes a quadrangle or even a pentangle by the end, with two Tristans and two Isolts to share in the misery. We do not know how Gottfried would have treated this denouement, given the fervent and indeed religious idealization of love that marks his prologue and the famous “grotto of love” scene. Thomas, however, may have intended to critique the androgynous ideal, with the psychic splintering of both lovers as a sign of its ultimate failure. In the absence of a complete text from either poet, it is impossible to say. But I would argue, extending the observations of Furber and Callahan, that the exchange of hearts in Tristan fails because it seeks to establish not only coinherence, which can accommodate difference, but also identity. Most medieval discourses on gender were of course marked by a heavy and, to modern taste, exaggerated stress on difference, always perceived in hierarchical

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terms. From biology to canon law, the male was seen as normative and the female as inferior and subordinate. Challenging this hegemonic view, the discourse of fin’amor offered two refreshing alternatives. It posited both a reversal of the gender hierarchy, with the male adopting a subservient role, and an attempt to abolish hierarchy altogether through the exchange of hearts, whereby “he is she and she is he.” But the ideal of fusion, conceived as androgyny or the complete transcendence of gender roles, inevitably failed when confronted with social reality. Just as surely as difference to medieval minds implied hierarchy, so equality entailed identity, and thus an impossible abolition of both sex and gender. The enormously popu lar Tristan story served as both stimulant and irritant to Chrétien de Troyes, the most influential twelfth-century romancer. Unfortunately, his own version of Tristan is lost,47 but in his five extant romances, heart topoi are ubiquitous.48 In Cligès (ca. 1176), his “oriental bazaar” of a romance set half at King Arthur’s court, half in Constantinople, Chrétien used the exchange of hearts as part of a systematic inversion and revision of the Tristan story.49 As in Tristan, roughly the first third of Cligès is devoted to the hero’s parents, whose love affair anticipates and provides a foil to the hero’s own. The Byzantine emperor’s son Alexander and his bride-to-be fall in love on shipboard, enabling a series of Tristan-like puns on loving (amer), love’s bitterness (amer), and the sea (la mer), with equally precious meditations on Love’s arrow and the vexed relationship of eyes and heart.50 Unlike Tristan and Isolt, however, these lovers drink no potion and share no shipboard tryst. And unlike Tristan’s impetuous parents, both are so shy that they suffer long in silence before Arthur’s queen, aware of their feelings, takes pity on them. When it finally becomes possible to arrange their marriage, Guinevere does so with these words: En riant dit: “Je t’abandon, Alixandre, le cors t’amie; bien sai qu’au cuer ne fauz tu mie. Qui qu’an face chiere ne groing, l’un de vos .II. a l’autre doing: tien tu le tuen et tu la toe!” Cele a le suen et cil la soe, cil li tote, cele lui tot. (vv. 2326–33)

“Now, Alexander, I give you the body of your dear sweetheart, because I know you have her heart. Whoever makes a fuss and bother, I give you two to one another. You take your own, and you take yours.” He has his own, and she has hers. He has her wholly, she him wholly.51 (vv. 2304–11)

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The queen’s rhetoric deliberately rejects the division of cors and cuer that bedevils the lyric lover. Where the cuer has already gone, the cors should follow, resulting in the mutual possession indicated by Chrétien’s chiastic play with masculine and feminine pronouns. But, though the lovers possess each other, they do not become one another; there is no exchange of identities. Their son Cligès recapitulates Tristan’s career by falling in love with Fénice, the promised bride of his uncle. Unlike Isolt, however, Fénice emphatically refuses to give her cors to one man while another has her cuer: Mialz voldroie estre desmanbree que de nos .II. fust remanbree

et ses cors fu a .II. rentiers.

I should prefer to be dismembered than have our mutual love remembered like that of Tristan and Isolde, of whom much foolishness is told that’s shamefully recalled and said. As for the life Isolde had led, it never could be to my taste because, in her, love was abased. With one her whole heart was obsessed; by two her body was possessed.

.....

.....

Ja mes cors n’iert voir garçoniers n’il n’i avra .II. parçoniers. Qui a le cuer, cil a le cors.

My body won’t be ill reputed, to two shareholders prostituted. Who has the heart shall have the body. (v. 3105–14, 3121–23)

l’amors d’Ysolt et de Tristan, don mainte folie dit an et honte en est a reconter. Ja ne m’i porroie acorder a la vie qu’Isolz mena. Amors en li trop vilena, que ses cuers fu a un entiers

(vv. 3127–36, 3143–45)

To save Fénice from the fate of Isolt, her nurse devises a magic sleeping potion that gives her new husband erotic dreams so that he imagines he possesses his bride, while, in reality, she remains a virgin. There follows a complicated, picaresque plot of adventures and narrow escapes before the lovers can finally be united. In the meantime, they endure precisely that separation of cuer from cors that Fénice had hoped to avoid. At their reunion, Chrétien devotes eighty lines to an elaborately mannered play on the exchange of hearts. Cligès and Fénice confess to one another that, during their separation, each has been living as cors

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sanz cuer, like a hollow tree. The body of Cligès has been in Britain while his heart sojourned in Greece, and Fénice’s heart was in British exile while her body stayed in Byzantium. Only when they meet again can each become whole, cors reunited with cuer, as Cligès avows: —Dame, don sont ci avoec nos endui li cuer, si con vos dites, car li miens est vostres toz quites. —Amis, et vos ravez le mien, si nos antr’avenomes bien. (vv. 5214–18)

“My lady, if your words are true, here with us are both hearts we own, for mine is totally your own.” “And my own heart in you is set, my friend, and so we are well met.” (vv. 5170–74)

Fénice reaffirms that their exchange of hearts will guarantee the lovers sole possession of each other’s bodies, once more rejecting the model of Tristan and Isolt: Vostre est mes cuers, vostre est mes cors, ne ja nus par mon essanplaire n’aprendra vilenie a faire, car quant mes cuers an vos se mist, le cors vos dona et promist si qu’autres ja part n’i avra.

“Yours is my heart, yours is my body, and at no time will anybody, with my behavior as a sample, learn villainy from my example. For when my heart went in your frame, it made my body yours to claim; no share will any other keep.”

.....

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Se je vos aim et vos m’amez, ja n’en seroiz Tristanz clamez ne je n’an serai ja Yseuz. (vv. 5234–39, 5243–45)

If I love you and you love me, a Tristan you will never be, nor I be named as an Isolde. (vv. 5189–95, 5199–201)

Although Fénice’s aversion to Tristan is often ascribed to Chrétien himself, on the ground that he supposedly disapproved of adultery, the character’s view is not necessarily the poet’s.52 In any case, Fénice does commit adultery, sleeping with Cligès while she is still married to his uncle Alis, and in the process she deceives her husband even more fundamentally than does Isolt. Although Alis is a scoundrel and deserves this betrayal, Fénice should hardly be seen as a champion of Christian marriage. Her moral principle is rather that the self can be

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whole only when it is freely given: Qui a le cuer, cil a le cors. The same principle animates Marie de France’s adulterous heroines. Isolt on this view sinned not so much by committing adultery as by allowing her husband to possess her body when he did not command her heart. Considering how central the imagery of changing hearts is to Cligès, it is remarkable that Chrétien devotes some forty lines, spoken in his own voice, to deconstructing that metaphor. The passage follows Fénice’s first meeting with Cligès, which occurs at her wedding to Alis. No sooner has she dutifully obeyed her father’s marriage plans than the young bride sees her husband’s nephew, Cligès, and the two fall in love at first sight. They exchange amorous glances, prompting the poet to a witty but doggedly literal observation on eyes, hearts, and bodies: Ses ialz et son cuer i a mis, et cil li ra son cuer promis. —Promis? Qui done quitemant! —Doné? Ne l’a! Par foi, je mant, que nus son cuer doner ne puet; autremant dire le m’estuet. Ne dirai pas si com cil dient qui an un cors .II.cuers alient, qu’il n’est voirs, n’estre ne le sanble, qu’an un cors ait .II. cuers ansamble; et si’il pooient assanbler, Ne porroit il voir resanbler. (vv. 2799–2810)

Her eyes and heart she did impart to him; he promised her his heart. He promised it? Gave it outright! Gave? No, I lie, that is not right. No one can give his heart away. Let me rephrase what I shall say, for I shall not be like somebody who says “two hearts joined in one body.” A farfetched statement altogether: one body with two hearts together; and, even if they joined as one, it seems unreal it could be done. (vv. 2777–88)

Chrétien points out that lovers actually unite their wills, not their physical hearts: “uns cors ne puet .II. cuers avoir” (v. 2829). But the reader already knows this, so why the elaborate mock-serious explanation? Chrétien’s excursus recalls a passage in the Vita Nuova where Dante, after personifying Amore as a god, feels a need to remind readers that Love is not really a person or a body, only “an accident in a substance.”53 He excuses his “patently false” personification with the claim that vernacular poets have a right to the same poetic license as those writing in Latin, but also the same responsibility to explain their “true meaning,” if asked, in plain prose without rhetorical figures. By unmasking their literary artifice, both poets are calling attention to it, so Chrétien too may be staking his

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claim to vernacular eloquence by showcasing his use of figurative language. His “appeal to common sense and physical reality” proves he is no fool, in case anyone had wondered.54 But it does not thereby prove that Cligès and Fénice are fools when, more than two thousand lines later, they ignore the poet’s anatomy lesson and proceed to exchange hearts. What they prove to be is literary lovers, self-consciously inhabiting a tradition that upholds the physically impossible— two hearts in one body—as a privileged sign of love’s passion.55 The same kind of exchange occurs in Yvain, where the quest undertaken by the hero begins with his fall. Having won the Lady of the Fountain as his wife, Yvain obtains her leave to spend up to a year fighting in tournaments, provided that he returns at the year’s end. An exchange of hearts, though seemingly conventional, plays an ominous role in their parting. When the knight bids farewell to his wife, King Arthur commands his body, but his heart remains behind. With the same comic literalism we have seen in Cligès, Chrétien here affirms the biologically impossible “wonder”: des que li cors est sanz le cuer don ne puet il estre a nul fuer; et se li cors sanz le cuer vit tel mervoille nus hom ne vit. Ceste mervoille est avenue, que il a l’ame retenue sanz le cuer, qui estre i soloit, que plus siudre ne le voloit.56 (vv. 2649–56)

We know the body can’t survive without a heart, yet he’s alive! His body has no heart inside! So it can never be denied that such a wonder came about, because he’s still alive without his heart, which, though enclosed before, will not go with him any more.57 (vv. 2475–82)

While he pretends to marvel at Yvain’s body remaining alive sanz le cuer, the poet is actually warning that he is about to become less than human. For, caught up in the thrill of masculine adventure, he predictably forgets his deadline, with the result that his wife publicly shames and disowns him before the whole Arthurian court. By failing to return as promised, Yvain abandons his own heart and neglects to care for his lady’s. Both meanwhile deceive themselves with false hope: Li cuers a boene remenance et li cors vit en esperance de retorner au cuer arriere;

The heart has a good home. They say the body must live for the day it joins its heart. It tries to cope

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s’a fet cuer d’estrenge meniere de s’esperance qui se vant, traïst, et fause de covant. (vv. 2657–62)

by fashioning a heart of hope; a strange heart, frequently a cheat, and full of treason and deceit. (vv. 2483–88)

Skipping lightly over the year’s adventures, Chrétien resumes his narrative when the lady’s messenger arrives at court to denounce Yvain before all. A true lover, she claims, takes the heart of his beloved not to steal but to cherish it: “Li amis prant le cuer s’amie / ensi qu’il ne li anble mie, / einz le garde” (vv. 2735–37). Yvain, on the other hand, is a thief and a murderer; by forgetting to return with her heart, he has slain his wife. Both undergo a symbolic death, since their separation is no longer that of faithful lovers guarding each other’s heart but a betrayal. The maid ends by snatching her lady’s ring, the symbol of her heart, from the knight’s finger. This act hurtles Yvain into madness: lacking sense or speech to respond, he loses his mind in exchange for the heart he failed to treasure. The knight must now work his way back from bestiality to regain his good name and his lady’s favor. Although he will eventually succeed, Yvain’s fate signifies the seriousness that an exchange of hearts implies. A lover may seem and act unchanged to outward sight, but he or she is in fact no longer free. The invisible bond of coinherence, though dishonored and forgotten, still retains its force for good and ill. Passing over two centuries and the Channel, we arrive at the consummate exchange of hearts in English. In Troilus and Criseyde, as John Leyerle showed long ago, the heart is the symbolic nucleus of the entire poem. The word “herte” appears more than 350 times, though its very commonness masks its importance.58 In contrast to Chrétien and the Tristan poets, Chaucer heightens the psychological difference between his lovers by exploring their hearts’ alternative routes to love, as dictated by the gendered conventions of lyric.59 Troilus, though feminized by his notorious passivity, “converts” by the most conventional masculine means. After angering Cupid with his unforgivable mockery of lovers, he is struck point-blank by Love’s arrow and smitten with irrevocable yearning for Criseyde. She, on the other hand, yields to love only “by proces and by good servyse / . . . and in no sodeyn wyse” (II.678–79).60 The narrator seems anxious that a “sodeyn love” would be held against his heroine, even though Troilus’s far more sudden infatuation had aroused no such concern. This anxiety is rooted in a convention as old as the twelfth-century lyric: love at first sight was considered normal and irreproachable in men, whereas ladies were expected to respond as slowly and reluctantly as possible to their impassioned wooers. In the space between these gendered expectations lies the whole tension and pathos of fin’amor.

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In Criseyde’s case, Chaucer exploits the “process” convention to create a psychological study of unparalleled depth, occupying the whole of Book II. After a domestic scene with her uncle Pandarus, who earns his name by pandering for his buddy Troilus to whet his niece’s curiosity, Criseyde happens to see a martial Troilus riding past her window, fresh from a victorious skirmish. Impressed, she engages in a long soliloquy, inconclusively weighing the pros and cons of love. As evening falls, she walks in a garden with her nieces, and one of them, Antigone, sings a love song that culminates in an exchange of hearts: But I with al myn herte and al my myght, As I have seyd, wol love unto my laste My deere herte and al myn owen knyght, In which myn herte growen is so faste, And his in me, that it shal evere laste. (II.869–73) Though Criseyde maintains a skeptical posture, inwardly she “gan to prenten in hire herte faste” every word of Antigone’s song (II.900). She then lies down to sleep in a setting dominated by a nightingale, the bird of love: A nyghtyngale, upon a cedre grene, Under the chambre wal ther as she ley, Ful loude song ayein the moone shene, Peraunter in his briddes wise a lay Of love, that made hire herte fressh and gay. That herkned she so longe in good entente, Til at the laste the dede slep hire hente. (II.918–24) It is at this point that Criseyde dreams of exchanging hearts with the eagle, a very different kind of bird, in the stanza cited as an epigraph to this chapter. And as she slep, anonright tho hire mette How that an egle, fethered whit as bon, Under hire brest his longe clawes sette, And out hire herte he rente, and that anon, And dide his herte into hire brest to gon— Of which she nought agroos, ne nothyng smerte— And forth he fleigh, with herte left for herte. (II.925–31)

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Interestingly (as we will see below), the thirteenth-century Occitan poet of Flamenca anticipated Chaucer in placing his lovers’ first exchange of hearts within a dream. Of course, Chaucer could not have known that precedent, but in both romances the dream serves to prophesy the coming love affair. At this point the reader knows something that Criseyde does not. Chaucer has made predestination an overriding theme of his romance, so that Criseyde, who clings more firmly than any other character to her confidence in free will, bears the brunt of his tragic irony. But while her dream predicts, it also motivates. We readers already know Troilus as an idealistic yet absurdly passive and even comically bathetic lover. Criseyde does not. She has caught only a single glimpse of him at a moment of glory, so her imagination transforms him into a kingly eagle, “fethered whit as bon” (II.926)—perhaps suggesting the purity of his intentions. In a discussion of her dream, Franck Zeitoun stresses what he calls its “sheer physical violence.” He sees Criseyde as “a defenceless prey” and “a helpless victim of her assailant,” so overcome by the aggressive eagle that “from now on, [she] is deprived of the power to steer her life and destiny.”61 This seems to me simplistic. While the reader may or may not see Criseyde at this point as a hapless plaything of Fate or Pandarus (surely not of Troilus), she herself has by no means lost her sense of agency. She will in fact continue until the end to see herself as exercising free choice, however deluded that belief may be. More important is Chaucer’s observation that, even as the dream eagle claws open Criseyde’s breast, extracts her heart, and substitutes his own, “she nought agroos, ne nothyng smerte” (II.930). Uncharacteristically, she feels neither pain nor fear but experiences the exchange of hearts just as Antigone sang of it: “Al dredde I first to love hym to bigynne, / Now woot I wel, there is no peril inne” (II.874–75). The dream has worn down her resistance (or revealed it as already worn down), but the “proces” must wind further on its circuitous course before the dream exchange can become a willed, deliberate action. That act takes place in the consummation scene, that inimitable mix of slapstick with the sublime. Criseyde lives her dream by way of yet another bird metaphor: “What myghte or may the sely larke seye, / Whan that the sperhauk hath it in his foot?” (III.1191–92). What the “sely larke” does say gives the lie to the “sperhauk’s” boast of conquest (“Now be ye kaught”), for Criseyde famously responds, “Ne hadde I er now, my swete herte deere, / Ben yolde, ywis, I were now nought heere!” (III.1210–11). As Joseph Gallagher puts it, Troilus must finally abandon his posture of erotic passivity, for “triumph over the woman is obviously part of his sexual reality. But his triumph, like the eagle’s, inflicts no pain. It is aggression without destruction. It is war turned to love, and Criseyde’s

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words clearly accept it.”62 After lovemaking the couple turn as others do to a ritual exchange of hearts: they “pleyinge entrechaungeden hire rynges” (III.1368), and Criseyde gives Troilus “a broche, gold and asure, / In which a ruby set was lik an herte” (III.1370–71). There follows an elaborate dawn song that elicits “blody teris” from the heart of Troilus (III.1445). At this point, as we have seen, it was customary for lovers to vow fidelity, but Troilus irritates Criseyde by the counterfactual terms of his pledge. He can only wish that he “were in youre herte iset so fermely / As ye in myn” (III.1488–89), leading her to protest That first shal Phebus fallen fro his spere, And everich egle ben the dowves feere, And everich roche out of his place sterte, Er Troilus oute of Criseydes herte. (III.1495–98) Our foreknowledge that this vow will be broken only heightens its emphatic poignancy. The exchange of hearts is subtly, bitterly echoed in the scene that impresses the reality of Criseyde’s betrayal on the incredulous Troilus. In a dissembling letter she writes from the Greek camp, she begins by warning, “Syn ye with me, nor I with yow, may dele / Yow neyther sende ich herte may nor hele” (V.1595– 96). Since the exchange of hearts was an act intended precisely to assure loyalty in absence, her excuse is a feeble one; Criseyde cannot send his herte back to Troilus, because she no longer has it. A few stanzas later, a chance of battle gives him the long-dreaded ocular proof. On the captured armor of Diomede, Criseyde’s new lover, Troilus sees a broach that he had given her as a love token on their last night together. He presumably still has the ruby-heart broach she had given him on their first night. After this Criseyde disappears from the poem, her fate unknown. Pandarus curses her (“I hate, ywys, Criseyde!” V.1732), but the faithful heart of Troilus becomes his doom: “I ne kan nor may, / For al this world, withinne myn herte fynde / To unloven yow a quarter of a day!” (V.1696–98). After the leisured, lovingly detailed courtship leading up to their exchange of hearts, the swiftness of the denouement is brutal. Now the lovers’ positions are reversed. It is Criseyde who sodeynly yields to Diomede, promising him a conditional routhe even at their first meeting, while Troilus arrives by slow, agonizing proces at the knowledge of her defection. While the exchange of hearts is but one of many topoi woven into this textured romance, it may be the one that best explains the absoluteness of Troilus’s despair. As critics have often noted, Pandarus and Criseyde are pragmatists, while Troilus is an ontological

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realist. For him the exchange of hearts is more than a symbol. Once he has given his heart—his vital being—to his lover and accepted hers, breaking the pact would be for him not only a wrong but an impossibility. He cannot “unloven” her, even if he would. For Criseyde it is other wise, so that her defection—the thing that cannot be, and that is—constitutes for Troilus not just a moral but a metaphysical crisis.63

Secular Sacraments While the Tristan poets used the exchange of hearts to explore androgyny, or the obliteration of gender difference through erotic identification, Chrétien was more concerned with the interplay of cors and cuer (Cligès) and the proper balance between love and chivalry (Yvain). Chaucer uses the symmetry required by an exchange of hearts to highlight the ultimate asymmetry of his doomed lovers, one choosing honor, the other survival. In the delicious Occitan romance of Flamenca, one of very few composed in the langue d’oc, the exchange of hearts becomes central to a full-fledged poetics and metaphysics of fin’amor. Written around 1274, Flamenca has no end or beginning, for it survives in a single mutilated manuscript from Carcassonne, yet it offers a kind of summa of troubadour culture.64 The romance begins by setting up a classic love triangle. Soon after his marriage to the lovely Flamenca, Sir Archambaut of Bourbon-les-Bains succumbs to jealousy, imprisoning his wife in a tower from which she is released, under escort, only to attend church and bathe in the mineral waters. Hearing of her plight, the learned and courtly Guillem of Nevers decides to love Flamenca, sight unseen, and he devises stratagems to meet her. Luckily Guillem has a fine voice, so he ingratiates himself with the priest at Bourbon by chanting the responses at Mass, then claims to be a repentant runaway cleric, has himself tonsured, and replaces the parish acolyte by paying two years of tuition for the boy to study in Paris. Once Guillem is ensconced in his new role, one of his duties is to carry the Gospel book to parishioners for the kiss of peace. Every Sunday and feast day, as he holds the book to Flamenca’s lips, Guillem uses it as a shield behind which he mutters two syllables sotto voce, in the presence of her husband, or awaits her laconic reply. Over a period of months, these whispered exchanges develop into a love dialogue modeled on a tenso by Peire Rogier. Lifted out of the narrative and reassembled, they constitute a stanza in themselves:

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—Ai las!—Que plans? —Muer mi.—De que? —D’amor.—Per cui? —Per vos!—Qu’en pucs? —Garir!—Conssi? —Per gein.—Pren l’i.65

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—Alas!—Why do you grieve? —I’m dying!—Of what? —Of love!—For whom? —For you!—What can I do about it? —Heal me!—How? —By craft.—Seize the day!

By the time Flamenca consents, Guillem has been able to construct a secret tunnel between his lodging and the baths, where he then arranges a tryst. The poet, a cleric or even a monk, seamlessly melds a liturgical sensibility with the erotic ethos of the troubadours, replete with heart metaphors. Love strikes the heart through the eyes, leaving wounds that heal without but burn within (vv. 2713–41). It makes two hearts one and binds two bodies with a single heart (vv. 2082–89). Sweetness that enters the heart through the eyes is “more refined and complete” than if it comes through the mouth (vv. 6564–91). Under the sway of Love (or any potent stimulus), the senses retreat to the heart, leaving the body dead to the world in ecstatic trance (vv. 2351–89). It is in just such a state that Guillem and Flamenca exchange hearts for the first time before they have even met. In a dream sent by Amors, Guillem courts his lady, and she yields to “the sweetness of prayer,” for she “does not have a savage heart” (cor de fera, v. 2901). Once she has given her heart for her lover’s, the dream lady suggests the very strategies Guillem will use to win the real Flamenca. This “prophetic” exchange, like Criseyde’s dream in Chaucer, invests the coming affair with an aura of destiny. What is more, it testifies to a quasi-mystical religion of love, with its own miracles and sacraments. In subconscious, telepathic contact, the lovers communicate on a level deeper than the physical or emotional plane. This is no mere conceit, Nelli insists, for the poet “believes beyond any doubt that passion, idealized and intensely lived, can lead to ecstasies in the course of which the ‘vision of the heart’ develops and mysterious contacts are established between lover and beloved, in spite of distance and material obstacles.”66 Once they have become lovers in fact, Guillem and Flamenca exchange hearts in two further rituals. When they part after first making love, kisses do not suffice: Amdui si ploron coralmen, e l’aiga que del cor deissen

Both of them wept heartily, and the water that poured from their hearts

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mesclon ensems, e pueis la bevon. Un petit fan plus que non devon, mais amoretas son corals don non gostan vilan ni fals domnejador outracujat.

mingled together, and then they drank it. They did this a bit more than necessary but love springs from the heart, and no rustic can taste it nor false impertinent seducer.67 (vv. 6013–19)

These lovers need no magic philter, for they brew their own potion from their mingled tears. The sacramental act explicitly substitutes tears for blood: the lovers weep coralmen (sincerely, “from the heart”) and drink from the common cup of their weeping. After all the Masses that constitute their courtship, here at last is communion. The ritual guarantees that theirs is a true “heartfelt” love (corals), such as no pretender can counterfeit. Speaking with a confidante afterwards Flamenca boasts of the absolute equality of their love now that “one heart binds us both” (uns cors amdos nos lia, v. 6207). Of course, the mingled waters also have a sexual symbolism, reinforced by the very site of their tryst—the mineral baths, where hot and cold waters flow together like male and female to heal all maladies (vv. 1479–83), including that of love.68 Strangely, the lovers’ union even cures Archambaut’s jealousy. Revitalized by love, the once-passive Flamenca chides her husband, who, against all logic, releases her from the tower, regains his courtly joi and hospitality, and announces a tournament. But the liberated Flamenca must in turn release Guillem to revive his chivalric honor, so another, lengthier parting looms. This calls for a renewed exchange of hearts: Flamenca, coma cortesa, ab son amic dos motz parlet e dis: “Amix!” pueis lo baiset, ab cest baisar mon cor vos liure e prenc lo vostre que.m fai viure.” Guillems respon: “Domna, eu.l prenc per tal covinent e.l retenc ques ieu en luec del mieu lo tenga,

Flamenca, as a courtly lady, spoke a word or two with her lover and said: “Friend,” then kissed him, “with this kiss I yield my heart to you and take yours, which gives me life.” Guillem replied, “Lady, I accept it on these terms, to be its steward and to keep it in place of mine,

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e prec vos del mieu vos sovenga.”

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and I pray that you be mindful of mine.” (vv. 6896–6904)

More conventional than the communion of tears, this rite is no less efficacious. What sets it off from comparable scenes is the seriousness with which both lovers treat the pact afterward. On receiving a letter from Guillem—borne by none other than her husband—Flamenca folds it in such a way that her own image on the parchment “kisses” Guillem’s, then places it over her breast, where she feels her lover’s heart beating in place of hers (vv. 7142–55). When Guillem returns, he greets Flamenca by asking, “How is my heart doing?” (mos cors que fai? v. 7388). She replies: Amix, en luec del mieu estai e, sol que.l mieu ren non movas del luec del vostre, non cresas qu’ieu negun tems lo vostre mova. E cist razons es assas nova e par d’amor o de lauzenga qu’en luec del mieu vostre cor tenga, e vos lo mieu, per tal maneira ques eu en vos lo mieu sofiera, e vos lo vostre eissamen sufras en mi per fin talen; e de talen faim tal liam don nostres cors amdos liam.

“My friend, it stays in the place of mine and, so long as you do not dislodge mine from the place of yours, do not think that I will ever remove yours. This is a strange new thing indeed and comes of love and subtlety— I keep your heart in place of mine and you keep mine, in such a way that I suffer mine to live in you, and in the same way you suffer yours to live in me through pure desire; and from desire we make a bond with which we bind both our hearts.” (vv. 7389–7401)

Flamenca’s manifesto, for such it is, asserts coinherence in perfect symmetry and equality. Yet neither androgyny nor identity is required; each lover retains his or her own personality and gender.

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For all its scintillating humor, Flamenca outlines a theory of love no less serious than Gottfried’s. In one highly metaphysical passage, the poet describes the operations of coinherence with great precision. The personified Fin’Amors offers joy through the portal of the eyes, on si ve e.s mira soven, quan vai ni ve dins ni defora, e d’un cor en autre s’encora; e fai cels cors tant encorar l’un en l’autre ques acorar pensa cascus quan l’autre.il faill.

wherein her image oft is seen as she goes back and forth, and moves from heart that loves to heart that loves. Thus Love from heart to heart can dart and so pervades and fills each heart that each would break if either failed.69 (vv. 6616–21)

Amors, the goddess of love, figures almost as a divine surgeon who exchanges lovers’ hearts and makes each to live by the other. In a wordplay impossible to translate, the poet puns on the verbs “encorar” and “acorar,” meaning “to touch the heart” in a positive or negative way. (Encourage and discourage, from Middle English corage or heart, once had similar connotations.) Through the mirror of the eyes, Amors “heartens” each loving heart, while a betrayal by either would “dishearten” the other more than metaphorically. Nelli is right to speak of “heart-magic,” for a strange sacramental realism hovers around the language of love in Flamenca. It is evoked in the love dialogue whispered in church, the amorous kisses mediated by the liturgical kiss of peace, the communion of mingled tears, the ritual kiss of exchange, the talisman of the folded letter over the breast. Inspired by the troubadours, “the poet has succeeded in giving their faded metaphors once again the value of (profane) mystical experiences, and in centering his whole erotic system around the myths of the heart.”70 Explored tragically in Tristan, playfully in Chrétien de Troyes, and ritually in Flamenca, the exchange of hearts reaches a grotesquely literal apogee in a French romance of the thirteenth century. Contemporary with Flamenca, which draws on the troubadours Peire Rogier and Jaufre Rudel, Jakemes’s Ro­ man du Castelain de Couci et de la Dame de Fayel is inspired by the trouvère Guy, a historical castellan of Couci, who died at sea in 1203. Seven of Guy’s lyrics are intercalated within the romance, which has been shaped by their dominant motifs.71 In the plot, the Castellan of Couci and the Lady of Fayel become lovers, exchanging hearts when they consummate their affair and again, more formally, when her husband finds out and the castellan must depart. As he em-

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barks for the Holy Land he vows fidelity, saying he could never love another because he travels “in body without a heart” (en corps sans coer, v. 7249).72 The lady grants her own heart in return along with the gift of her braided hair, which she presses on her departing lover: “Se tant m’amés, Vous les emporterés o vous, Et avoec est vos mes coers tous; Et se sans mort je le pooie Partir, je le vous bailleroie.”

“If you love me so much, you will take [my braids] with you, and with them, my whole heart is yours; and if I could part with it without dying, I would deliver it to you.” (vv. 7313–17)

After two years in the Holy Land, the castellan is wounded by a poisoned arrow and sails for France. Knowing he will die at sea, he dictates a letter of farewell, asking his valet to deliver it to his lady with a silver casket containing her braids and his own embalmed heart. This is their third exchange of hearts: the first had been metaphorical, the second mediated by her hair, but the third is quite literal.73 As the letter states: Et pour cou que je sai et croi Que vo coer emportai o moi, Quant je me parti de Faiiel Et me donnastes le juyel, Qui mout fu biaus et avenans, De vos nobles ceviaus luisans Que j’ai gardés tres cel tempore, Vous envoie jou mon coer ore: C’est vos, s’est drois que vous l’aiiés.

Because I know and fully believe that I carried your heart with me when I departed from Fayel and you gave me the jewel, most beautiful and charming, of your noble, glistening hair, which I have well guarded all this time, I am now sending you my heart: it’s yours, it’s right that you should have it. (vv. 7661–69)

In effect, the dying castellan returns both hearts to the lady, his own and hers. His bequest echoes the real-life provisions often made by nobles, including the crusader king Louis IX, to have their hearts extracted and buried separately from their bodies in family tombs or specially meaningful shrines.74 By sending

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the reliquary of his heart to the Dame, the castellan unknowingly anticipates her fate, for her own body is to become its ultimate reliquary. The romance takes a novel turn when the valet is intercepted by the Lord of Fayel. Furious at this new evidence of betrayal by his wife, he gives her lover’s heart to his chef, asking that it be made into a special dish, which he then serves her. Interestingly, she finds the dish exquisite, asking why their chef doesn’t prepare it more often; is the meat too expensive? Her husband replies: “Dame, n’ayiés nulle mierveille, S’elle est boinne, car sa pareille Ne poroit on mie trouver Ne pour nul denier recouvrer.” ..... “Je vous affi en boinne foi Que vous en ce mes chi mengastes Le coer celui que mieus amastes.”

“Lady, do not wonder if it is good, for its like could never be found again or purchased for any price.” ..... “I swear to you in good faith that here in this dish, you have eaten the heart of him you loved the best.” (vv. 8057–60, 8064–66)

Upon seeing the coffer with her hair, the Lady of Fayel is compelled to believe this and vows, after tasting such a gentil viande (v. 8109), never to eat again. Like Isolt she dies of a broken heart. Le Castelain de Couci differs from other eaten-heart tales in that the lover is not killed by the jealous husband but voluntarily sends his heart to his lady. With this final, literal gift, he seals their prior symbolic exchange, and the husband’s revenge makes her body the literal tomb of his heart. But that vengeance backfires, for if the Lord of Fayel had hoped to destroy his wife’s passion forever by tainting it with the monstrous, he fails miserably. Instead, by her appreciation of the strange dish and subsequent suicide, the lady turns cannibalism into communion.75 “Ha! com dolereus envoi a De son coer que il m’envoia! Bien me moustra qu’il estoit miens, Li miens devoit bien iestre siens! Si est il! Bien le mousterai, Car pour soie amour finnerai.”

“Alas! What a sorrowful gift is his heart, which he has sent me! He showed me truly it was mine, so mine should just as well be his! So it is! I will prove it well, for I will die for love of him.” (vv. 8143–48)

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The extravagant mourning by the Lady of Fayel stems not from horror at her unwitting cannibalism but solely from grief at her lover’s death. As Jakemes tells the tale, she might just as easily have killed herself if the valet had delivered his gift as intended. Here is one possible end point of the exchange of hearts, that figure of speech that strives so persistently to prove it is not one but is instead a real thing. Yvain loses his mind with his lady’s heart; Isolt dies of grief when the possessor of her heart is dead, and Troilus when Criseyde gives her heart to another. Guillem and Flamenca make a sacrament of the exchange of hearts with their potion of mingled tears. The Lady of Fayel, finally, consumes the heart of her lover and so becomes his tomb, literalizing a conceit broached in the letters ascribed to Heloise and Abelard nearly two centuries before. The eaten heart, as Helen Solterer remarks, “brings to a climax the pattern of literalizing symbolic figures.” In the lovers’ profane eucharist, “he breaks the body and she eats it— thereby achieving a paradoxically perfect union.”76 But if even secular romance could read a cannibal act as ultimate communion, what, then, should we expect from the Catholic faith—the most material of religions?

Exchanging Hearts with Jesus In the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries, a fruitful marriage of fin’amor with the Song of Songs eroticized religious expression to a hitherto unprecedented degree.77 As a result, the devout soon discovered that Jesus, like a good courtly lover, was eager to exchange hearts with his brides. This is one of the most striking, unmistakable cases of romance influence on devotion and hagiography. The devotional tradition followed the same course as the secular, progressing from lyric explorations of the theme to exemplary narratives, with the latter insisting more strenuously over time on the material reality of the exchange. Although the secular writers arrived first, the two literary and iconographic traditions remained closely intertwined. A twelfth-century author inspired by Bernard of Clairvaux and Richard of Saint-Victor observes: “In order for the affections of lovers to merge into one through this unitive virtue [of charity], it is necessary for the lover’s heart to melt away from itself so that it can be transfused, transformed, changed into the one it loves, and united to the other—just as a drop of water infused into wine seems to lose itself completely as it takes on the taste and color of the wine.”78 Melting, merging, and migrating hearts are met frequently thereafter. St. Hermann Joseph

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(d. 1241), a Premonstratensian of Steinfeld and the author of a lost Song commentary, penned a devotional lyric in which he prays, in the person of the Bride: Iam cor meum dilatatur Et iam in te delectatur, Sentit vere te praesentem, Sentit te in se manentem Praegustat suavem gratiam.

Already my heart expands And already it delights in you; It feels you truly present, It feels you abiding in it, Already it tastes sweet grace.

.....

.....

Iam cor meum non sit suum, Vivat tibi sitque tuum; Sit in te et tu in eo, Ut quiescat sic cum Deo Fiatque unus spiritus.79

Let my heart no longer be its own, Let it live for you and be yours; Let it be in you and you in it, That it may thus find rest with God And become one spirit [with him].

This plea for coinherence, given narrative form, would become an enduring topos of mystical hagiography. As a prelude to the exchange of hearts proper, thirteenth-century legends about the early Christian martyr St. Ignatius helped to popularize a cult of the heart in devotional thought and practice. Vincent of Beauvais’s Speculum historiale (ca. 1245) added a brief section marked auctor (meaning that Vincent wrote it himself) to the martyr’s legend: “St. Ignatius wrote twelve letters. His heart was divided in pieces and the name of Jesus Christ was found in golden letters, as we read, in each of its parts. He was said to have Christ in his heart.”80 The saint actually wrote seven letters, here augmented perhaps to recall the twelve apostles (he was said to be a disciple of St. John, and one of his apocryphal letters addressed the Virgin Mary, no less). By a mystical transposition of active into passive, the letters Ignatius inscribed on parchment become letters inscribed on his heart, presumably divided into twelve pieces. Like the Eucharist, his broken heart remains whole in every fragment. Vincent of Beauvais’s invention clearly piqued the interest of contemporaries, for as early as 1247 the preacher William of Savoy was citing it as an ancient miracle authenticated by Rome. To promote devotion to the Holy Name, William added the gloss that as St. Ignatius was being tortured, he cried ceaselessly on the name of Jesus. In response to the pagans’ queries, he explained that this name was written on his heart and therefore he could not be silent. So they killed him and performed an autopsy, whereupon they found the golden

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letters.81 Jacobus de Voragine inserted these details into his ubiquitous Golden Legend (ca. 1260), which quickly spread the tale throughout Europe.82 It is but a short step from having the name of Jesus inscribed on one’s heart to possessing the heart of Jesus himself. That grace is first reported of Lutgard of Aywières (d. 1246), the Flemish Cistercian nun whom we encountered in Chapter 2 as a miraculous mind reader. Her Life, written by her friend and disciple Thomas of Cantimpré, is contemporary with the legend of Ignatius’s heart. In the Dominican’s miracle-drenched narrative, her exchange of hearts with Christ belongs to a series of mystical favors that include Lutgard levitating at prayer, sucking from the wounds of Christ, chanting with miraculous sweetness, and oozing holy oil from her fingertips. Thomas makes this gift the culmination of a “three wishes” scenario in which Lutgard first receives, then rejects, the gifts of healing and of understanding the Latin Psalter. Finally Christ asks what she truly wants, and she replies, “ ‘I want your heart.’ ‘No, rather it is I who want your heart,’ replied the Lord. ‘So be it, Lord . . . with you as my shield, my heart will be secure for all time.’ And so a communion of hearts occurred from that time on, or rather, the union of an uncreated with a created spirit through a surplus of grace. It was this of which the Apostle says: she ‘who clings to God is made one spirit with him’ ” (1 Cor. 6:17).83 If Thomas’s chronology is accurate, which it may or may not be, Lutgard was still in her teens and had not yet made her monastic profession when this occurred. The exchange of hearts thus marks only the first stage of her love affair with Christ, rather than a state of spiritual perfection. As with earthly lovers in romance, the exchange is first of all a vow of fidelity. From this time forth, Thomas explains, Lutgard never felt the least stirring of carnal temptation, for her heart belonged wholly to her celestial bridegroom. Whether the Vita Lutgardis established a model or simply marked a trend, the exchange of hearts would soon become a regular feature of women’s mystical Vitae. More than thirty women are said to have received this grace, among them Gertrude of Helfta (1256–1301/2), Adelheid Langmann (1312–75), Catherine of Siena (1347–80), Dorothea of Montau (1347–94), Osanna of Mantua (1449–1505), Teresa of Avila (1515–82), Caterina de Ricci (1522–90), and Marguerite-Marie Alacoque (1647–90).84 I will here discuss Gertrude, Catherine, and Dorothea, each of whom is interesting for different reasons. As we have seen, the mutual exchange of hearts (as opposed to the lover’s unrequited gift) is a theme proper to romance heroines. In hagiography, the exclusively feminine character of this motif adds Lutgard, Catherine, and Dorothea to the lineage of Blanchefleur and Isolt, Fénice and Flamenca, Criseyde and the Dame de Fayel, the sole difference being that they chose Jesus for a lover.

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Since Lutgard and Dorothea left no writings, their hagiographers’ accounts are all we have to go on. For Thomas of Cantimpré, the romance model is decisive: an exchange of hearts seals Lutgard as Christ’s bride and confirms her vow of fidelity, which is to say virginity. For Dorothea of Montau’s biographer, Johannes Marienwerder, the material reality of the exchange becomes a cornerstone in his account of Dorothea’s sainthood. The case of Catherine is especially interesting because her own heart narrative and her biographer’s differ in key respects. In each case, an exchange of hearts confirms and symbolizes the coinherence of a saint with Christ. Interestingly, though, the largest set of medieval texts on the exchange of hearts is written by women, indicating that male hagiographers did not simply impose or invent the motif. This is the vast corpus of mystical hagiography from Helfta, much of it written by or about Gertrude the Great but encompassing the extensive revelations of her friend Mechthild of Hackeborn and the literary contributions of two or more other nuns. During the long reign of Mechthild’s sister, Abbess Gertrude of Hackeborn (1251–91), the wealthy Saxon abbey was a hotbed of visionary culture. Affiliated with the Cistercians by its Rule and the Dominicans by its clergy, Helfta was home from about 1270 until 1282 to Mechthild of Magdeburg, a celebrated vernacular poet-mystic, who took refuge there after old age, blindness, and harassment put an end to her independent life. The former beguine dictated the last book of her Flowing Light of the Godhead at Helfta, so her previous visions were certainly known to the nuns. In one of them—early in her mystical life, as with Lutgard—Christ shows Mechthild his divine heart aglow like “red gold burning in a great fire of coals.” As he places her soul within it, “the exalted Sovereign and the little waif thus embrace and are united as water and wine.”85 The beguine’s fiery spirit must have been a mystical catalyst for the sisters who transcribed her revelations, for they continued to write long after she died— with the difference that, unlike the beguine, they had the ability to compose in Latin.86 Unique in thirteenth-century women’s literature, the Helfta corpus testifies to these nuns’ remarkable theological culture and Abbess Gertrude’s respect for books and learning. In just over a decade—from 1289 through around 1302— the women of Helfta produced two prodigious Latin tomes, the Legatus divinae pietatis and the Liber specialis gratiae, which together fill about twelve hundred printed pages. Traditionally, the Liber is attributed to Mechthild of Hackeborn (1241–98), chantress and sister of the abbess, while the Legatus is ascribed to her younger friend, Gertrude the Great (1256–1301/2).87 It would be more accurate, however, to describe both books as the fruits of an exceptional collaboration.88 Written in the last years of her life, from 1291 to 1298, the Liber recounts the

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revelations of Mechthild of Hackeborn as told to two unnamed nuns, one of whom was surely her beloved Gertrude. As for the Legatus, only Book 2 (ca. 1289) was written by Gertrude’s own hand. Book 1 is a hagiographic account, while Books 3–5 relate her visions in the same “as told to” genre as the Liber. Their authorship is unknown, and the nuns’ commitment to anonymity means that the riddle of who wrote what can never be solved. More important, however, is the relationship disclosed by these braided texts. Gertrude and Mechthild, who had both entered the cloister as children, became intimate friends, sharing their most private experiences, admiring each other’s gifts, praying for each other, and receiving revelations through and about one another. Both were unquestionably in love with Jesus and exchanged hearts with him; but they also loved each other, making Jesus the mediator through whom they exchanged their own hearts. Placed side by side, their books are a visionary hall of mirrors in which the same images recur, ascribed now to Gertrude, now to Mechthild, mediated by their sister scribes. Throughout the Helfta literature, the heart of Christ offers and signifies “experiential space” (Erfahrungsraum).89 It is a reassuringly material abode of love, a powerful sign of divine abundance and interiority. Nurturing, life-giving, and infinitely resourceful, it is also a womb-like shelter that may be entered through the side wound, and like a womb, “it bleeds, it flows, it opens, it encloses.”90 Metaphorically it is compared to a lyre, a lamp, a vineyard, a furnace, and a fountain, from which flow streams of crystal, rosewater, and of course blood. Above all, the heart of Christ is the mystic’s home. In one vision Mechthild sees it as a very beautiful house, lofty and wide. Within it she saw a little cottage built of cedar wood, its interior walls covered with splendid silver plate, and in the midst of it sat the Lord. She easily recognized this house as the heart of God, for she had often seen it under this form. But the cottage inside represented the soul, which is immortal and eternal, just as cedar wood is immune to rot. . . . The Lord said to her, “Your soul is always enclosed like this in my heart, and I am in the heart of your soul. You contain me in your inmost 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.”91 In this image of coinherence, Christ is both inside and out—seated within the little cottage that figures the soul, and far beyond it as the great house enclosing that cottage. Mechthild’s heart is both container and contained.

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On another occasion, feeling unworthy of God’s favor, Mechthild protests that she has no right even to wash the dishes in God’s kitchen—prompting a revelation that Christ’s “kitchen” is none other than his divine heart. Just like a kitchen, the heart of God is accessible to all, both slaves and free, ready to fulfill their desires. Its “dishes” are the hearts of the saints, which the nun sees being constantly replenished with “a torrent of godlike pleasure” from the heart of Christ even as they constantly refill it with their gratitude.92 Here the exchange of hearts is not private but communal, a ceaseless flood of delights flowing between God’s heart and each devotee’s. Gertrude made the same image her own. In one of her many exchange-of-hearts visions, she offers her heart to Christ, asking him to cleanse it with blood and water from his own heart. She then sees Christ offering her heart to the Father, united with his in such a way that the two parts form one chalice. Accepting her prayer that her heart may stand ready at need for anyone he may wish to serve, like the flagons on a lord’s table, Christ asks the Father that “this heart [may] pour out, to your eternal praise, all that my Heart contained for dispensation in my human nature.”93 This exchange of hearts is not an end in itself but a means to serve others. As Anna Harrison has shown, the women of Helfta conceived their communal writing project as a way of enacting such symbolic exchanges in practice. Reading of her sisters’ experiences should encourage the monastic reader “to become aware that she has much and . . . to want more” of God’s heartfelt love.94 Unlike the exchange of hearts in romance or in saints’ Lives like the Vita Lutgardis, where it signifies an exclusive bond, the exchange of hearts in the Helfta community is inclusive and open-ended. One of the most frequent images is the emanation of “golden reeds” ( fistulae) from the Sacred Heart, through which the sisters sip grace as if from straws. A fistula was the reed that priests used to drink from the consecrated chalice,95 suggesting that for Gertrude, who compared Christ’s heart to a chalice, this grace replaced the sacred beverage that nuns could no longer receive in Communion.96 In one vision she sees a golden pipe reaching down to her from the Sacred Heart and receives through it “an overflowing bounty of all she could desire.”97 Soon afterward, the same grace is extended to the whole congregation. As the mystic prays for her sisters, Christ assures her that he has given each one a golden reed by which to draw all she desires “from the depths of my divine Heart.”98 Gertrude understands the reed as free will, so that those who drink most copiously from the Sacred Heart are the nuns who have most fully surrendered their wills to God, while others, more self-reliant, receive gifts with difficulty from a greater distance. Gifts from Christ’s heart can even be given by proxy. Praying for a nun, Gertrude sees “a little stream of crystalline purity” flowing from the heart of God into her sister’s

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heart.99 She asks how this can possibly help the other, who remains unaware of it, but Christ promises that, like a slow-acting medicine, the grace will take effect in due time. In a variant on this theme, Mechthild sees rays of light extending from the heart of God into the hearts of her two scribes. Since these nuns had long been writing without her knowledge or consent, the vision reassures her that the Liber has indeed been written by God’s grace.100 Within the communitarian ethos of Helfta, there seems to have been no objection to relationships that a slightly later monastic regime would stigmatize and repress as “particular friendships.”101 Mechthild and her protégée, Gertrude, clearly had such a relationship, which in the Legatus divinae pietatis is vividly expressed through the lexicon of the heart. Book 1 recounts a series of visions Mechthild had about Gertrude, perhaps during the younger nun’s novitiate, while Book 5 is a play-by-play narrative of Mechthild’s death as imagined in Gertrude’s visions. Both accounts were recorded by other, unnamed nuns, embedding the love triangle of Jesus, Gertrude, and Mechthild firmly in the matrix of community. No male scribes or priests are mentioned, making this work a testament of female intimacy nearly unique in medieval literature.102 The first set of visions, nested in Gertrude’s Vita, seems at first to reflect some rivalry between the two mystics. A stranger “well proven in divine revelations” comes to Helfta seeking spiritual profit and is told by Christ that the first nun who sits down beside her will be the most faithful of all. Gertrude is in fact the first, but “out of humility” she declines conversation. After her comes “Lady Mechthild, the chantress of blessed memory,” whose gracious words please the stranger so much that she imagines Christ had deceived her. In response, the Lord asserts, “I am doing great things in this one [Mechthild], but much greater in the other [Gertrude].”103 Doubtless not all the nuns would have agreed with that assessment; but who could have been the source of the anecdote? Surely not Gertrude, who could not have boasted of her own humility; nor Mechthild, whom the pious stranger would not have insulted by repeating such a message; nor the stranger (a stock figure in such tales), unless she had been sent by the devil expressly to sow discord! Rather, the tale is a literary fiction crafted by the writer to press claims for the living Gertrude’s holiness, even as she gracefully nods to the saint cult already forming around Mechthild, her mentor and friend. There follow four anecdotes in which Mechthild, probably in her role as novice mistress (magistra), describes her visions and dialogues with Christ about Gertrude. In the first she sees the young nun walking to and fro before the Lord, “longing ardently for the emanations from his divine Heart.”104 Next, while praying for her protégée, Mechthild sees Gertrude’s heart in the likeness

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of a bridge, fortified on one side by Christ’s humanity, on the other by his divinity, as if by two parapets.105 This vision assures her that anyone who seeks to reach Christ by way of Gertrude will not go astray. The third vision is more intimate: Mechthild sees her friend in Christ’s embrace, pressing her heart against the opening of his side wound. To explain the image, Christ tells Mechthild of the special favors he has granted Gertrude through the joining of their hearts. Her prayers for others will always be answered, no one she recommends for Communion will be considered unworthy of it, and no one who hears her words “can possibly be wrong in thinking that the secret of my divine Heart is made known through what she says.”106 In the fourth exchange, Mechthild worries that the younger nun is too impulsive, but Christ reassures her that Gertrude has already attained a high degree of perfection: “I have chosen her to dwell in, so that her will, and consequently the operation of her virtuous will, are one with my Heart; she is like my Heart’s right hand by which my will is accomplished.”107 The heart figures here as the self in concentrated form, the medium of union. It is directly through his heart that Christ acts and communicates, and the arresting image of Gertrude as his “Heart’s right hand” revalues what Mechthild had at first seen as her youthful rashness. Far from expressing envy, Mechthild must have related these flattering narratives from her sickbed, just as she revealed the visions compiled in her Liber. Her sister scribes found in her memories a perfect vehicle to introduce their compilation of Gertrude’s visions. Book 5 of the Legatus, which deals with souls of the departed, turns the tables. In the writer’s loving fifteen-page account of Mechthild’s death, only Gertrude’s revelations make the soul of the beloved chantress transparent to her sisters.108 The account nowhere states that the dying Mechthild confided any experience to Gertrude; all is mediated by Christ through visions and dialogues. At one point Gertrude humbly decides not to share these revelations with the community, but Christ is displeased. So, despite her best efforts, she can see nothing more about Mechthild’s soul until she repents.109 Spiritual hoarding is not allowed, nor is a soul permitted privacy; the divine intimacies of one are meant for all to share. So we have, in effect, the story of the death of Mechthild as her best friend imagined it, projecting onto her vigil every love token from God that the sisters desired for themselves. As Mechthild is anointed in the presence of saints and angels, Gertrude sees Christ give her a honey-sweet kiss with his passionate lips. After the unction, he embraces her “so that the wound of his most sweet Heart lay open to her mouth, and from it she seemed to draw every breath that she took and exhale it once again into the same loving Heart.”110 Not the dying woman herself but her soul, in the form of

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a lovely young girl (puella valde delicata), exhales thus into the wounded heart. Each time she does so, Christ drenches the world in a rain of grace. Similar visions continue until the hour of consummation, when Christ wraps his bride in a mantle of light and calls to her: “Come, ye blessed of my Father, receive the kingdom; arise, make haste, my beloved, and come.”111 With this greeting, Gertrude notes, Christ reminded Mechthild of how, a few years earlier, he had given her his heart with the same words as a pledge of love. The reminiscence is also a literary allusion, for it must have been Gertrude herself who recorded Mechthild’s account of that experience in the Liber. Hearing the Mass “Come, ye blessed,” Mechthild had expressed a wish to be among the happy souls who would receive such a greeting, and the Lord had promised that she would. “I will give you my heart,” he added, “as a pledge that you can always have with you. On the day I fulfill this desire of yours, you will return it to me as a testimony. And I give you my heart as a house of refuge so that, in the hour of your death, you will enter into perpetual rest by no way except into my heart.”112 Thenceforth, says the Liber, Mechthild conceived a profound devotion to the Sacred Heart. Now as she lies dying, Gertrude imagines Christ asking tenderly, “And where is my gift?” In response she sees Mechthild opening her heart with both hands, “and the Lord, applying his own most holy heart to her heart, happily joined her whole being to his glory, absorbed by the power of his divinity.”113 The account ends with posthumous visions in which Mechthild, now among the blessed, enables her devotees to draw fresh gifts from the heart of Christ. Pious deathbeds were a staple of hagiography, but only this one lets the reader into the very soul of the saint in her final hours. Gertrude was certain she knew what Mechthild was experiencing, just as Mechthild had earlier been privy to Christ’s intimacies with Gertrude. Each woman sees her sister kissed or embraced by God, welcomed into his wound, and united with him in the bed of his heart. There is no hint of repression in these unabashed erotic visions.114 Nor does jealousy arise, for the women love each other just as they love Jesus. Here, then, is a love triangle with a difference. In romance literature, the woman often functions as a lens to focus a relationship between men: Troilus and Criseyde is as much about the friendship of Troilus and Pandarus as about the hero’s fatal love.115 What we see in the Helfta texts is a religious parallel with the genders reversed. The Legatus divinae pietatis celebrates the intimate friendship of Gertrude and Mechthild, “lesbian-like” in its emotional intensity but triangulated through the heart of Christ.116 Theirs is not so much the “mystical love noir” that Karma Lochrie discerns in the writings of Hadewijch and Angela of Foligno, as an optimistic, almost utopian brand of mystical sensuality, which neither posits

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a conflict between divine and human love nor privileges suffering, as Catherine of Siena and Dorothea of Montau would do.117 Where male hagiographers imagined the exchange of hearts as a unique, exclusive pair-bond between a saint and Jesus, explicitly opposed to human love, the Helfta women embedded the exchange in a broad context of interpersonal and communal intimacy, setting their treatment of the theme apart from all others.

From Symbol to Substance On 19 June 1341, St. Juliana Falconieri lay dying in Florence, surrounded by her sisters. Although she yearned to receive the viaticum, her illness was such that the priest would not allow it. Desperate, she begged him at least to bring her the host in a pyx. When he had done so, she lay down on the floor in cruciform position and asked that a corporal with the host be placed upon her breast, that she might in this way be united with her Savior. All was done as she asked. No sooner had the host been laid over her heart than it vanished—and at the same instant the saint died, smiling, in the kiss of her Beloved. The sister who washed her body for burial discovered a miniature image of the Crucifix engraved in a circle above her heart.118 Juliana’s story is the best known of a once-familiar type of miracle. Similar tales are told of St. Bonaventure (d. 1274) and even Hugh of Saint-Victor (d. 1141)— the latter in the Golden Legend, of all places.119 The host that vanishes into the heart, where the Holy Spirit dwells, points to a close tie between the Eucharist and the Sacred Heart, such as we have already seen at Helfta. A death like Juliana’s can therefore be viewed as a variant on the exchange of hearts: the saint receives the eucharistic Christ into her heart even as, dying, she enters his. The same affective piety that prompted Christ’s lovers to exchange hearts with him also, more commonly, turned sacramental Communion into a longed-for, ecstatic love feast. So it should not be surprising if two fourteenth-century saints, well known for their eucharistic cravings, also exchanged hearts with Christ. But in their experience this event had a much clearer connection with the physical heart than we find with Gertrude and Mechthild. Unlike the Helfta nuns, Catherine of Siena (d. 1380) pursued a highly visible, public career. A peacemaker and reformer, she campaigned incessantly to return the papacy to Rome, then to heal the Schism that erupted when it did return in 1378. But, thanks to Raymond of Capua’s influential biography, the Legenda maior (1385–95), Catherine won greater fame as a mystic and ascetic, a

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bride of Christ given to prodigious fasting and ecstatic revelations. Raymond had to present his protégée in this light to justify her apostolic mission and overcome the resistance that such an exceptional woman aroused. As Karen Scott has shown, he could only succeed in getting his saint canonized by grounding her dangerously political mission in the bridal mysticism that churchmen had come to expect of holy women.120 Thus his Vita downplays, without entirely suppressing, her political role and highlights private spiritual experiences, which her voluminous letters rarely mention. Adapting the chronology of Catherine’s life to his thematic needs, Raymond clusters a series of mystical favors in the chapter (II.6) just before his account of her public mission, in order to show that she had already reached perfection as a contemplative and could now embark on the apostolic life without danger to her soul. The exchange of hearts is the first of these graces, inaugurating a sequence that culminates in her “mystical death.” Always scrupulous about citing his sources, Raymond says he learned of the exchange from the notebooks of Catherine’s previous confessor, Father Tommaso della Fonte, who dates the event to 20 July  1370.121 As Catherine prays the words of Psalm 50—“Create in me a clean heart, O God”—Christ appears to her, opens her side, and extracts her heart. This was no mere vision, Raymond insists, but an experience so physically compelling that when she next went to confession Catherine said “she no longer had a heart within her breast.” Father Tommaso laughed, then reproached her for this delusion, but she persisted: “It is a fact, Father. As far as I can judge from what I feel in my body, I seem no longer to have any heart in it.”122 For several days she repeated this claim—until Christ returned with his own heart: “Suddenly a light from heaven shone round about her. In the midst of the light our Lord appeared, bearing in his sacred hands a human heart, ruby in colour and ablaze with light. All a-tremble at the advent of the Author of light, she fell to the ground. Our Lord approached her, opened her left side once more, and placed within it the heart which he was carrying. ‘See, my daughter Catherine,’ he said, ‘a few days ago I took your heart from you; now, in the same way, I give you my own heart, by which you may live forever.’ ”123 For Raymond, as later for Dorothea of Montau’s confessor, the material reality of the miracle was allimportant. Thus he notes, “[Catherine’s] companions informed myself and many others that they had often seen the scar” from the incision.124 Catherine herself claimed that she could no longer commend her heart to Christ, as she used to do, because he already possessed it. A magnificent illuminated manuscript of the Legenda, produced in the fifteenth-century Rhineland, includes a rare double illustration of our theme. In

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Figure 3 An angel takes St. Catherine of Siena’s heart. Life of St. Catherine of Siena. Paris, BnF ms. allemand 34, fol. 52v, ca. 1425–30. Photo: Bibliothèque nationale de France.

the first painting (Fig. 3), an angel rather than Christ flies off with the heart of the saint as she stands in prayer, profiled against a sky spangled with crimson stars. Her long, unbound hair is a sign of virginity. In the sequel (Fig. 4), Catherine kneels before Christ, the Man of Sorrows, as he plucks the heart from his wounded side and hands it to her. For both Raymond and the illustrator, this exchange marks a turning point in the saint’s life. The Legenda major states that Christ’s heart, now animating Catherine’s body, issued in a ceaseless stream of revelations and miracles. For the painter, following literary convention, the exchange of hearts signified the consummation of a spiritual marriage. Even though he had depicted her wedding to Christ some twenty-five folios earlier, he continued to paint Catherine in secular garb up to the scene where the angel extracts her heart. But from the time she receives the Lord’s heart, she is always shown in the religious habit, having definitively become a bride of Christ.125 In

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Figure 4 Christ gives his heart to St. Catherine. Life of St. Catherine of Siena. Paris, BnF ms. allemand 34, fol. 54r, ca. 1425–30. Photo: Bibliothèque nationale de France.

later, more iconic images, such as Guidoccio Cozzarelli’s panel painting in Siena (Fig. 5), the offered heart becomes one of Catherine’s most common attributes. We have no account of any such exchange from Catherine’s letters, though this need not surprise us because it occurred several years before the correspondence began. Catherine does, however, refer very often to Christ’s heart as a source of infinite love and bounty, and to her own as a vessel of suffering. In her correspondence, these allusions reach their climax in her two final letters, which describe not an exchange but a sacrifice—not bridal but pastoral, not private but ecclesial. Lamenting the sickly condition of the church, sucked dry by corrupt and self-centered priests, Catherine offers her own heart, pulsing with Christ’s blood, as a remedy for his ailing bride.126 In a farewell letter said to have been written in her own hand (15 February 1380), she tells Raymond how two weeks earlier, at God’s urging, she had offered her life for the church. “Oh eternal

Figure 5 St. Catherine offers her heart to Christ. Guidoccio Cozzarelli, ca. 1500. Siena, Pinacoteca nazionale. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

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God,” she prayed, “accept the sacrifice of my life within this mystic body, holy Church! I have nothing to give except what you have given me. Take my heart and squeeze it out over the face of this bride!” In response, “God eternal, turning the eye of his mercy [on me], tore my heart out by the roots and squeezed it out over holy Church. He had drawn it to himself with such force that if he hadn’t encircled the vessel of my body with his strength (not wanting it to be broken), the life would have gone out of it.”127 As she prayed thus, Catherine suffered what seems to have been an actual heart attack. She describes feeling “as if my memory and understanding and will had nothing to do with my body,” while simultaneously enduring demonic attacks and perceiving divine mysteries. In a second and final letter, composed later the same day, she adds that at the time, “the pain in my heart was such that my tunic was torn apart wherever I could get hold of it, while I reeled about the chapel as if I were in convulsions. . . . The terror and physical pain were such that I wanted to run. . . . But all of a sudden I was thrown down, and, once down, it seemed to me as if my soul had left my body. . . . I remained that way for such a very long time that the family [her circle of friends and disciples] was mourning me as dead.”128 The end was in fact very near. On 26 February Catherine suffered a second attack, after which she lay paralyzed until her death on 29 April. There is no contradiction involved in seeing this near-death experience as both a mystical sacrifice and a massive heart attack, though interpreters have been strangely reluctant to offer such interpretations.129 Nor does one event need to be privileged as the cause of the other. Catherine’s asceticism, especially her prolonged failure to eat, undoubtedly weakened her heart, while the pain she suffered in turn gave her the opportunities for sacrifice that her ardent soul craved.130 What seems strangest about her account is not its quintessentially late medieval fusion of extreme pain with ecstatic prayer but rather the idea that she could heal a desperately sick woman (albeit an allegorical one) by squeezing her heart’s blood into her face. Catherine’s thought seems akin to the folk belief that leprosy could be cured by the blood of an innocent virgin or a child.131 The idea of transferring such a remedy to the church could only have occurred to someone who was steeped in blood piety, inclined to both physical and metaphysical realism, and devoted body and soul to the cause of reform—in a word, to Catherine. Like the Castellan of Couci in the romance, she has symbolically offered her heart several times, but the final gift must be the organ itself The version Raymond offers of this sacrifice differs greatly, even though he quotes from her letters and sets her agony, as Catherine herself does, in the context of Schism politics.132 On his account, the saint at prayer sees “in spirit the

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whole city of Rome filled with demons busy in every quarter,” inciting the people to assassinate Urban VI.133 Despite her pleas, God refuses to prevent such a heinous deed because he wants more cause to wreak his well-deserved vengeance after it. So Catherine resolves, like Abraham or Moses, to be a voice of mercy opposing the just wrath of God. For days and nights she prays without ceasing, caught between howling demons and a recalcitrant Lord. At last she offers to bear in her own body the full vengeance he had meant to take on his disobedient people, and with this sacrifice she achieves her goal. The rebellion dies down, the pope is saved, and her own sufferings increase beyond measure until her death soon afterward. But Raymond says nothing of the sacrifice of Catherine’s heart, nor does his account suggest any crisis resembling a heart attack. Rather, Catherine suffers blows inflicted by demons, whose terrifying threats she can also hear. Three major differences set Raymond’s narrative apart from hers. First, where Catherine’s letter mingles the natural with the supernatural, Raymond follows hagiographic precedent and mentions only the latter; even Catherine’s physical pain results from demonic torments. Second, all reference to the heart has been expunged—probably because, on Raymond’s account, Catherine had long ago given her heart to Jesus and no longer had one to offer. Finally and most important, Raymond’s Catherine dies to save an individual man, the pope, rather than the feminine church. In short, Raymond privileges romance models for both her initial exchange of hearts and her final sacrifice; she dies for a man she loves, not the community. On her own telling, she dies for Ecclesia. But Raymond’s account was the one that became canonical, all the more so after Catherine was canonized in 1461. More intelligible and better known than her idiosyncratic letters, it established a paradigm for the exchange of hearts that remained standard for centuries to come, perpetuated by artists and hagiographers alike. Dorothea of Montau (d. 1394), a widow and mother of nine, could not be Christ’s bride in the same way as the virginal Gertrude, Mechthild, or Catherine. But in daily conversations with her confessor, she helped him construct her as a martyr of love. Her exchange of hearts with Christ was one of many painful experiences that established her in that role. Dorothea’s canonization process, which stresses the physical reality of the change, recalls the famous earlier case of Clare of Montefalco (d. 1308). The Italian saint’s canonization hinged on the presence of the arma Christi (symbols of Christ’s Passion) literally impressed on her heart by meditation and discovered there when her sisters dissected her corpse.134 Such cases testify to a growing conviction that the spirit alone is not enough. In forensic matters, such as canonization, the body now had to bear its own persuasive witness.

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Having lost eight of her nine children to plague and other ailments, Dorothea intensified her already savage ascetic practices near the end of her life, when she was enclosed as an anchoress. Her spiritual director, Johannes Marienwerder, had been a university theologian and cathedral canon.135 Delighted to have a potential saint in his care, he interrogated Dorothea at length about her suffering and her mystical experience, which for most purposes were one and the same. Guided by her confessor, Dorothea interpreted the bleeding, itching, festering wounds that covered much of her body—caused perhaps by a dermatological or autoimmune disorder—as stigmata or “wounds of love.” Similarly, she linked the varieties of mystical love discussed by Richard of Saint-Victor and other theorists with her physical torments. Thus she was said to suffer at various times from ardent love, gushing love, boiling love, maddening love, and languishing love, among others—as well as heart-rending love, which eventually killed her.136 Given this intensely corporeal piety, it is no wonder that she experienced an exchange of hearts. This event took place before the high altar of St. Mary’s Church in Danzig on 25 January 1385, when Dorothea was thirtyeight years old. According to Marienwerder, it marked the beginning of her fervent bridal relationship with Jesus. Having received “a mass of flesh, totally aflame,” in lieu of her old heart,137 Dorothea gained in a single moment more knowledge of the saints than if she had studied their Lives for a year; received the Christ Child as a gift from the Virgin in the first of many such encounters; began to make frequent, excruciatingly detailed confessions; and felt an everincreasing desire for the Eucharist.138 Most witnesses in the canonization hearings (1404–6) were questioned on article 21, which asserted that as Dorothea was praying to prepare for Communion, “our Lord Jesus Christ, a wonder-working lover, extracted her old heart and inserted a new and fervent heart in its place. And at once, from that hour, she felt her spirit exalted and ravished to contemplate celestial things and illumined by a dazzling and inestimably sweet radiance; and her inner senses were opened.”139 In his massive hagiographic dossier, Marienwerder raised an academic question: Did the saint’s exchange of hearts with Christ alter her “substance” or merely her “nature”? He personally opined that the exchange entailed “not only an alteration of nature but also a change of substance”—a transubstantiation of Dorothea’s heart, so to speak.140 When Christ performed the operation, he gave his servant “overflowing, immeasurable, and very great charity, . . . satiating, sweetening, well-ordered, most fragrant, fruitful, inseparable, and immortal charity.”141 But the miracle he accomplished was not “merely” spiritual. To prove that God can radically transform human bodies as well as souls, Marienwerder

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adduces the mutation of Eve from bone into flesh and of Lot’s wife from flesh into salt. He even adds a miracle of Saints Cosmas and Damian from The Golden Leg­ end. Appearing in a dream to a sick man, those holy physicians amputated his leg, which had been consumed by cancer, and replaced it with the leg of a dead Moor who had just been buried. When the man awoke, he found himself healed, though for the rest of his life he had one white leg and one black.142 It was just such a miracle, Marienwerder says, that Christ worked in the case of Dorothea’s heart.143 Marienwerder’s colleague, the canon lawyer Johannes Reyman, declined to comment on the metaphysics of the change but testified amply to its effects. Her new heart gave Dorothea new senses, he asserted, by which she could prophesy events distant in space or time, see the consciences of men and the hosts of angels, hear the wailing of souls in purgatory, and taste and smell wondrous savors in the Eucharist. Her “sense of spiritual touch” was so graciously awakened that she could experience Christ her Bridegroom in diverse ways— “sometimes visible, sometimes palpable, sometimes embraceable, sometimes kissable.” From this union she conceived, so that her womb was “magnified or inflamed by the abundance of spiritual delights,” and she felt a divine fetus gestating and kicking within her.144 On the logic of these theologians, then, Dorothea’s new heart initiated a change that pervaded her whole body, spiritualizing her perceptions in what remained a profoundly sensual way. Perhaps it was indeed too sensual, for after a strong start, the canonization process limped on inconclusively until 1525, when it was abandoned.145 Dorothea finally won a backdoor canonization in 1976 on the basis of immemorial cult. After Catherine and Dorothea, the exchange of hearts would become a topos so deeply ingrained in female hagiography that, in the 1880s, the theologian Jérôme Ribet still insisted on its material reality. He argued that, just as the Body of Christ could be present simultaneously in heaven and on altars throughout the world, so the heart of Jesus could beat at the same time in his own breast and that of a privileged saint.146 Writing in the mid-twentiethcentury Dictionnaire de spiritualité, André Cabassut took this argument seriously enough to offer a theological rebuttal.147 So effectively had the romance paradigm infiltrated the sacred! Arising as an imaginative symbol of love and mutual indwelling, such as we find in the romances of Chrétien de Troyes and the mystical texts from Helfta, in the later Middle Ages the exchange of hearts took on an ever more insistent, alarming physicality. To prove its genuineness, it was now the actual, corporeal heart that must be given or exchanged, resulting in either death or a radical transmutation of the self. In this respect the startling eaten-heart romances, such as Le Castelain de Couci et la Dame de Fayel, run

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parallel to Catherine’s ecstatic sacrifice and Dorothea’s mystic extravagance— in a trajectory that leads perhaps to the striking personality changes experienced by modern transplant patients. Insofar as the heart is the self, the seat of identity, it is also “the space in which we interinhabit one another.”148 So to give one’s heart to another, in life or in death, is in some measure to become that other—to enter that strange realm of I-in-you, you-in-me, that Christian tradition knows by the name of coinherence.

Coda: Transplanting Hearts In the half century since modern transplant medicine literalized the poetic metaphor of exchanging hearts, an increasing amount of anecdotal evidence suggests that this surgery can result in personal relationships between the living and the dead.149 To the consternation of surgeons, who tend to reject such tales as fantasy, more and more stories of this kind have emerged. A 1999 study in the journal Integrative Medicine describes ten cases of remarkable personality change among heart transplant recipients, as ascertained from interviews with patients, their families and friends, and donors’ families.150 For example, a middle-aged white factory worker, described by his wife as an Archie Bunker type, makes friends with his Black colleagues and develops a surprising passion for classical music. His donor, it turns out, was a young Black man killed in a drive-by shooting en route to a violin lesson. A five-year-old boy, given a new heart in infancy, picks out his donor’s father in a crowd and runs up to him, calling “Daddy!” Another young boy with the heart of a drowned girl develops a sudden fear of water, which he always used to enjoy. A man with a woman’s heart becomes a better lover and experiences a newfound joy in shopping, while another develops a taste for perfumes and the color pink. A lesbian activist goes straight and gives up her favorite restaurant, McDonald’s, because the smell of meat now disgusts her. Her donor, a vegetarian and heterosexual, had run a health food restaurant. In a later incident, in 2004 a man named Sonny Graham, aged sixty-five, of Hilton Head, South Carolina, married Cheryl Cottle, a widow thirty years his junior. Their union made national headlines because in 1995 Sonny Graham had received the transplanted heart of Cheryl’s late husband, Terry Cottle. After four years of wedded bliss, Graham shot himself in the head and died—just as Terry Cottle had done thirteen years before.151 Scientific responses to such anecdotes differ, to say the least. In the Inte­ grative Medicine study, the authors remark that all seventy-four patients in

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their sample “showed various degrees of changes that paralleled the personalities of their donors,” though not always as dramatically as those described. They posit a theory of cellular memory to explain how “information and energy are transmitted electromagnetically between the brain and heart, [so] that through electromagnetic resonance, the brain may process information derived from the donor’s heart.”152 Other studies cite organ recipients who claim to have internalized such donor traits as generosity, artistic talent, piety, aggression, and even the ability to speak a foreign language.153 Claire Sylvia’s 1997 memoir, A Change of Heart, narrates her own developing relationship with her donor and presents a range of theories, both scientific and metaphysical, that purport to explain such phenomena.154 Meanwhile, popular culture has embraced the idea of heart transplants as not only saving but also transforming lives. The 2000 romantic film Return to Me, directed by Bonnie Hunt, anticipates the real-life story of Sonny Graham and Cheryl Cottle.155 But such tales also elicit widespread skepticism, especially within the medical community. A 2004 Israeli study finds that, out of thirty-five male heart transplant patients, only a third “entertained the possibility” of personality change caused by their donors’ hearts. The researchers ascribe these patients’ “fantasies” and “magical thinking” to the physical and emotional stress of the surgery.156 An Austrian study of forty-seven transplant patients shows even less openness to the phenomenon; 79 percent categorically denied any personality change. But, as if to prove that Freud’s Vienna has not changed very much, the authors see these patients as presenting “massive defense and denial reactions.”157 Three patients even in this group, however, reported personality change in conformity with their donors. Now that transplants have become routine, this debate will doubtless continue for some time. It would be more than a little ironic if a medieval ontology proved better able than a modern one to account for the affective outcomes wrought by this medical feat. As a metaphor of love, however, the exchange of hearts remains irreducibly a literary topos, even when it is corporeally realized. So, having begun this survey with some of the earliest romantic poets, I would like to close with one of the latest. Here is e. e. cummings’s full-blooded reinvention of the theme, which (prosody aside) would have been perfectly intelligible to Bernart de Ventadorn or Chrétien de Troyes. i carry your heart with me (i carry it in my heart) i am never without it (anywhere

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i go you go, my dear; and whatever is done by only me is your doing, my darling) i fear no fate (for you are my fate, my sweet) i want no world (for beautiful you are my world, my true) and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant and whatever a sun will always sing is you here is the deepest secret nobody knows (here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows higher than soul can hope or mind can hide) and this is the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart i carry your heart (i carry it in my heart)158

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Chapter 4

Mother and Child Giving Birth

In the splendor of the holy ones, I bore you from the womb before the morning star. —Psalm 109:3 (Vulgate) The Lord said to her, “I have come to you in glory with violent charity, wishing to do great violence to your body. Indeed, I want to give birth to myself in your soul. And how could my bride know that she had conceived me or is bearing me, if I did not grow and enlarge myself in her?” —Christ to Dorothea of Montau, in the Life by Johannes Marienwerder (ca. 1394)

The themes of this book—coinherence, permeable selves, the formation of one person by and through another—play out in many ways. But life affords only one circumstance in which one person physically dwells in another. For that reason, metaphors of pregnancy have inescapably colored attempts to imagine the spiritual indwelling so central to Christian theology. No more intimate relationship can be conceived, nor any in which the fates of two persons are so inextricably entwined. In no other situation is one person literally formed by another to so great a degree. So exploring the attitudes, practices, and metaphors surrounding medieval pregnancy should be an ideal way to approach the meaning of personhood as coinherence, or indwelling. Yet when we undertake that study, we are confronted at once by paradox. Pregnancy as metaphor is ubiquitous, but the

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metaphors seem at every turn to contradict the normal experience of it. We find a pregnant Father and a pregnant Virgin; pregnant minds, pregnant souls; and bodies that feel or seem to be pregnant yet are not. Other metaphors circle around impossibilities: a permanent pregnancy, in which birth is perpetually deferred or endlessly repeated; a reciprocal pregnancy, in which each partner is at once mother and child. In short, as soon as pregnancy is qualified by such terms as spiritual and mystical, it enters a phantasmal realm where the usual expectations are turned upside down and inside out. Is this simply another instance of the well-known medieval tendency to prize the intellectual and spiritual above the material, and the paternal or virginal above the maternal? Or does this endless theological play with pregnancy-as-metaphor finally valorize maternity in ways that medical and practical discourses never quite managed? In this chapter I tease out some answers by exploring a few of the many medieval discourses about pregnancy—medical and scientific, folkloric, pragmatic, liturgical, hagiographic, devotional, and theological. I begin by looking at actual pregnancy and proceed to its metaphorical and metaphysical permutations. There already exist several good accounts of childbirth and pregnancy in medieval medicine, but I will concentrate on dimensions that highlight the interpersonal relationships involved.1 These normally center on mother and child, but figures such as the midwife, the wet nurse, and the priest can also play important roles.

Two in One: Expectant Mothers Where do babies come from? This is the first scientific question many children ask, and their speculations often reveal their earliest thoughts about sexuality. In the same way, medieval thinking about conception and pregnancy—or what a mother is and does—sheds light on the era’s assumptions about sex and gender. Most of these views were inherited from antiquity, with some shifts in emphasis and, over time, infusions of both ecclesiastical thought and popular wisdom. One major divide concerned the female role in reproduction. The most important ancient Greek medical writers, Hippocrates (5th/4th c. b.c.e.) and Galen (late 2nd c. c.e.), maintained a “two-seed theory” of conception. In this view, the male’s semen united at conception with female seed, contained in the woman’s vaginal secretions. Amazingly, the human ovum was not discovered until 1928.2 Nevertheless, the Hippocratic and Galenic view posited that both parents contributed genetically, as we would say, to their offspring and thus held a rough equality in conception. Aristotle, on the other hand, held that only the male produced seed,

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which supplied the vital form that made the offspring human. This form imprinted itself on the woman’s contribution—her menstrual blood, which provided matter and nourishment for the developing fetus.3 Male and female thus came to be related as form and matter, or active and passive. These competing theories interacted in a complex way throughout the Middle Ages, with medical writers more often following the Galenic tradition, while natural philosophers preferred the Aristotelian.4 Even after the mid-thirteenth century, when Aristotle’s treatise On the Generation of Animals was translated into Latin, most medical writers continued to uphold the two-seed theory. It was espoused among others by the leading Arabic authors Haly Abbas and Avicenna, the so-called Trotula texts from Salerno, Bartholomaeus Anglicus, pseudo-Albertus Magnus (De secre­ tis mulierum), the popular Dialogue de Placides et Timéo, and Henri de Mondeville.5 But other influential thinkers, especially Averroes, Albertus Magnus, and Thomas Aquinas, adopted the Aristotelian “one-seed theory.” The conflict between these views was never resolved, and it even varied by genre: some writers followed Galen in a medical context but turned to Aristotle in their philosophical works.6 This disagreement matters because it had such a profound, lasting impact on the understanding of motherhood. Clichés about the mother’s “passive” role in generation persisted for centuries, despite the glaringly obvious fact that begetting a child is the work of a pleasurable moment, while bearing and giving birth to one requires nine months of discomfort, pain, and what is rightly called “ labor.” A further misogynist element entered into this theory through ancient taboos about menstrual blood, transmitted by Pliny’s Natural History and given wide currency by Isidore of Seville. These authorities warned that the menses could rust iron, stain mirrors, spoil wine, wither plants, and make dogs go mad.7 Even the gaze of a menstruating woman, like the evil eye, could blight its object. So the fetus, created from such a toxic substance, was itself impure.8 Morally tainted by original sin, it was physically tainted by the very blood that fed it. As the bearer of such a being, unclean yet also sacred (as a new creation of God), a pregnant woman was not a little uncanny.9 A whole array of determinisms surrounded the fetus. Its sex, physical traits, and moral character were thought variously to be shaped by the relative strength of the male and female seed (in the Hippocratic theory), the predominance of heat or cold, the time of intercourse, the embryo’s implanting on the right or the left side of the womb, the phase of the moon at conception, the influence of the planets during pregnancy, and the position of the stars at birth. Taken individually, any one of these factors might seem fatalistic. But in the aggregate,

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there were so many variables (some of them unknowable) as to make prediction impossible, relegating them to the status of ex post facto explanations. The most unusual theory of conception is undoubtedly that of Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179). Although she subscribes to many standard beliefs about the quality of semen, menstrual blood, the influence of the moon, and so forth, she alone among medical writers takes an interest in the emotional relationship of the parents. In sexual intercourse, she explains, “the two become one flesh” (Gen. 2:24) in a very specific way. The woman’s blood receives the man’s semen cum voluntate amoris, “with loving desire,” to produce a single blood, while the man too draws the woman’s foam and sweat into his own body. Thus both partners are physically altered by their union, as God established from the beginning.10 In conception, the strength of the man’s semen and the quality of parental affection weigh equally in determining outcomes. More robust seed will produce a male, thinner semen a female. But a child of either sex will turn out to be “prudent and virtuous” if the parents love each other in recto amore caritatis, with “right cherishing.” If such love is lacking in either parent, the offspring “will be weak and not virtuous,” and if neither has love, a bitter child will be born.11 Though framed as a theory about conception, rather than marriage or child-rearing, this concern with parental love represents a unique attempt to fuse medical with moral teaching. Sadly, it remained little known and had no influence. Special concern always hovered around the infant’s gender. The preferred male sex was linked with such auspicious factors as greater heat at conception, healthier or more abundant seed, and the more favorable right side of the womb. Thomas Aquinas states outright that the procreation of a male is always nature’s intention. A female results from some accident or flaw in the process, though one necessary to preserve the species.12 A male fetus was supposedly easier to carry as well; the mother would have better color and less fatigue during pregnancy.13 Not only would her cravings be more severe with a girl, but frustrating them could even endanger her life as well as the child’s. The supposed reason was that females had “more burning desires,” which would be doubled if both mother and child belonged to the less favored sex.14 Aristotle, followed by Avicenna and Aquinas, thought that quickening (the infusion of the soul) took place forty days after conception for the warmer, more perfect male. But it took ninety days before the cooler female developed enough to acquire a soul.15 On a popular level, robust folk traditions clustered around the determination of a child’s sex. One of the most interesting sources is a dialogue known as Les Évangiles des quenouilles (The Distaff Gospels), a fifteenth-century compendium of women’s folklore from Picardy and Flanders, cast in literary form by a fictive male

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“scribe.” One of its female speakers asserts confidently that if a woman wants to conceive a boy, “she must clench her fists while her husband does nature’s work.”16 It also helps to have intercourse in the morning; the evening is more likely to produce a girl. Remarkably, the text assumes that a pregnant woman knows the sex of her fetus subconsciously (to use an anachronistic term), if she can only be made to access that knowledge. For instance, if someone surreptitiously sprinkles salt on her head while she is sleeping, the gender of the first name she speaks on waking will indicate the child’s sex.17 Other signs require even less effort to discern. If the expectant mother leads with her right foot when walking, she will have a son; if with her left, a daughter. If you ask about the child and she says confidently that it’s a boy, then “you should know for sure that she will have a girl.”18 Or simply observe her behavior: if she craves poultry and venison and “enjoys hearing about tournaments and jousts,” she will deliver a boy; if she favors music and dancing, a girl.19 Lay culture assumes that gender roles—elite ones, in this case—are already innate in the fetus and will transfer by osmosis to its mother. The coinherence between mother and child has a profound influence on both. As Sylvie Laurent observes, “The woman throughout her pregnancy remains under the influence of her child, who can affect her behavior and her imagination. Paradoxically, the expectant mother can also intervene to shape the physique and character of her child. The two are still one; they mutually influence one another because they are part of the same flesh.”20 Because her experiences and even her imagination could permanently shape the child, what the mother thought, ate, or even looked at during pregnancy was of vital concern. If someone touched an expectant mother’s head gently with the flat of a sword, this would guarantee a brave son.21 But she must never eat a hare’s head, because it would give her baby a harelip, or a fish head because it could be born with its mouth turned up like a fish.22 Monstrous births, authorities claimed, could be caused by the woman’s imagination during intercourse, so fanciful images of animals and grotesques should be kept out of the bedroom.23 Even speaking to a woman about some unobtainable food could mark her child, and touching her face with cherries, strawberries, or red wine would give the infant red birthmarks.24 The mother of the future Pope Leo IX (1002–54), according to his hagiographer, was so moved by gazing at a cross during pregnancy that her son was born with tiny red crosses all over his skin.25 Anecdotes of this kind are better known from a racist fear expressed in early modern texts, namely, that a white woman who happened to look at the wrong picture at the wrong time might deliver an “Aethiopian.”26 But the power ascribed to maternal imagination is based on a long-standing belief.

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Medical writers pay considerable attention to regimen for a pregnant woman, for her own comfort but, more important, also for the well-being of the fetus. The Gynecology of Soranus, an important Greek physician of the early second century c.e., was not directly known in the Middle Ages, but much of it was transmitted in a Latin compendium by Muscio (ca. 500), an other wise unknown writer. Soranus divides pregnancy into three phases: a risky period immediately after conception; a much longer phase, characterized by morning sickness and cravings; and a brief third phase before childbirth. In the early period, “one must beware of every excess and change both bodily and psychic,” because so many conditions can result in loss of the newly implanted seed.27 These include mental and emotional upsets, coughing or sneezing, vigorous exercise, falls and blows, “pungent substances” such as garlic and onions, drunkenness, vomiting, any flow of blood (even nosebleeds), fever, cramps, massage, bathing (because it relaxes the body too much), and sexual intercourse. Fortunately, this dangerous phase ends after a week or so. During most of her pregnancy, the woman should follow a relaxed regimen—eating light meals of lean meat and mild vegetables, taking short walks, enjoying warm baths, and anointing her belly with virgin olive oil. She is presumed to be a lady of leisure, for recommended pastimes include dancing, being carried about in a sedan chair, and exercising her voice by reading out loud.28 If she experiences nausea or loss of appetite, brief fasting may help; she should never be forced to eat and should stick to easily digested foods. In the last trimester, once morning sickness is over, the expectant mother should eat more, bathe or even swim for relaxation, get adequate sleep, and “divert her soul.” At this point it is again best to avoid sex because too much shaking of the uterus can endanger the fetus. To prepare for childbirth, the midwife should begin to dilate the orifice of the womb by anointing it with her finger at frequent intervals.29 For those who could afford this sensible regimen, it would undoubtedly have been helpful. Medieval texts continue to transmit much of Soranus’s advice, adjusted to current conditions. One of the well-known Trotula texts, De sintho­ matibus mulierum (On the Conditions of Women), stipulates that “nothing [be] named in front of [the woman] which she is not able to have,” because frustrated cravings can cause miscarriage. “If, however, she desires clay or chalk or coals, let beans cooked with sugar be given to her.”30 Swollen feet can be rubbed down with rose oil and vinegar. Bathing and anointing the belly are again recommended, and a medicine is prescribed to treat excessive bloating. Aldobrandino of Siena, the author of a thirteenth-century French Régime du corps, says an expectant mother should abstain from salty foods, which could cause a child to be

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born without nails or hair, but “drink good wine tempered with a little water.”31 (Medieval authorities would have been surprised by our avoidance of alcohol during pregnancy. In many regions, because of poor sanitation, wine would have been a safer drink than water.) The mother-to-be should avoid hard labor as well as negative emotions, such as anger, sadness, and fear. Aldobrandino supplies a recipe for an electuary, or sweet potion, of eye-popping expense: among its ingredients are ginger, mastic, cassia, cardamom, nutmeg, cinnamon, and pepper. But this drink is recommended only for “those who can,” that is, the very rich. As birth approaches, the same wealthy women should take frequent herbal baths, and afterward drink two deniers’ weight of balsam dissolved in lukewarm wine. In this case, however, the writer prescribes a less expensive drink that can be used to the same effect by poorer women.32 Much of Aldobrandino’s advice still sounds reasonable today. For example, the expectant mother should prepare for labor by walking up and down stairs (and resting afterward), doing breathing exercises, smelling fragrant sachets, and avoiding extremes of heat and cold.33 A lay writer, the Chevalier de la Tour Landry, warns his daughters against pride with the exemplum of a stylish woman who, by refusing to lay aside her tight clothes even while pregnant, had endangered her child.34 Such texts, written by and for elites, raise pointed questions about class. Apart from the cost of exotic spices from the East, how many pregnant women could really manage to give up agricultural labor or eschew fear and anger? An English pastoral manual, the Oculus sacerdotis (ca. 1320), tells priests to advise their pregnant parishioners to avoid heavy work and to breastfeed their own babies after childbirth.35 But such advice was more easily given than taken. All hands were usually needed on the farm—except during winter, when hunger was a greater risk than overwork. In reality, hard labor as well as lack of adequate nutrition (not to mention domestic violence) must have caused many miscarriages.36 So, while medical texts can give the impression that pregnancy was a time of comfortable leisure, even indulgence, such cases were surely rare. Recognizing the desperation of poor women, especially single mothers, a few urban hospitals in the high Middle Ages provided special birthing rooms to accommodate their labor and convalescence. Such institutions, most common in northern France and the Low Countries, might have reduced maternal mortality, though others think they increased it because the close quarters helped to spread puerperal fever.37 For women of all classes, sex during pregnancy was a complicated issue. It was widely thought that pregnant women experienced greater desire. The Trotula, Albertus Magnus, Vincent of Beauvais, the pseudo-Albert treatise On the Secrets of Women, and the Dialogue de Placides et Timéo all testify to this belief.38

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Physicians reasoned that the mother-to-be retained her menses to nourish the fetus, and because menstrual blood was thought to be cold, its accumulation in the womb increased the already cold woman’s yearning for masculine heat. But this physiological plight put pregnant women in a double bind, for they were morally obliged to abstain. There were two principal reasons for this taboo. First, sex during pregnancy was non-procreative and thus violated the church’s strictures on marital intercourse. In addition, if any semen managed to penetrate the seal of the pregnant womb, it could damage the fetus, or even if it didn’t, the vigorous motion could cause a miscarriage. The misogynistic pseudoAlbert gibes that prostitutes would deliberately have extra sex during pregnancy to induce abortions. If they happen to conceive, “they have a great deal of sex . . . [to] be freed from their pregnancy by the excessive motion,” while the erotic pleasure will “blot out the grief that they feel from the destruction of the fetus.”39 The real Albertus Magnus considered sexual relations in pregnancy to be permissible because the wife’s urgent desire required the “medicine” of intercourse.40 But for other scholastics who weighed in on the question, such as Raymond of Penyafort and Alexander of Hales, sex at this time was a mortal sin because of danger to the fetus.41 These views on conception and pregnancy suggest that expectant mothers were treated with a mix of consideration and suspicion. The consideration was doubtless greatest at the upper levels of society, where the production of heirs was paramount and women had more leisure, better health care, and superior nutrition. Some beliefs were decidedly misogynist, such as the one-seed theory, the alleged “passivity” of mothers, the fears about menstrual blood, and the requirement that wives abstain from sex when they supposedly wanted it most. But that rule was unenforceable, and scientific theories debated in the schools had little effect on ordinary women. In any case, physicians almost never attended childbed. That was the prerogative of midwives, at least after the revival of the ancient profession in the thirteenth century.42 Doctors were not summoned unless a fatal outcome seemed likely, and even then only by the wealthy.43 One hardly unexpected finding is a strong preference for boys, expressed both theoretically and practically, in learned texts and in folklore. Unless an infant’s gender is the topic under discussion, treatises on pregnancy and child-rearing assume sons as a matter of course. Another, more interesting observation grows out of the coinherence of mother and child. The growing fetus alters the body and mind of its mother—affecting her diet and behavior, requiring her to change her whole way of life until delivery. She in turn can have a life-changing impact on the child she carries. Hence those about her must do their best to

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help the pregnant woman avoid shocks, control her volatile emotions, moderate her inevitable cravings, and keep her imagination in check before any of these do serious harm. Underlying the oft-expressed fears for the fetus, we catch a whiff of implicit fear of the fetus. For this little creature—innocent yet guilty (of original sin), helpless yet dangerous—had the potential to end its hapless mother’s life. All these fears converge on the liminal moment of birth.

Childbirth: At the Crossroads of Life and Death From rustic midwives to terrified virgins on their wedding night, from learned physicians to homilists touting virginity, everyone knew that childbirth was a crossroads of life and death. Reliable statistics are impossible to come by, but a variety of sources show that maternal and infant mortality remained high throughout the period. In the early Middle Ages, the likelihood of death in childbirth might have been the chief factor behind a conspicuous shortage of women. Hence, in the laws of the Salian Franks, the wergild for a woman of childbearing age was thrice that of an adult man, whereas after menopause their values became equal. When a blow resulted in the death of both a pregnant woman and her child in utero, the crime was labeled “double murder.”44 Despite the misogyny of high medieval culture, pregnancy continued to enjoy some legal protections. In England, some legal texts treated assault that caused a miscarriage or stillbirth as a capital crime. Conversely, a pregnant criminal could not be tortured or executed until she had given birth.45 That may be what Margery Baxter, tried for heresy in 1428, meant when she claimed to have “a charter of salvation in her womb.”46 A woman’s chances of surviving childbirth began to increase in the late eleventh century, thanks to better techniques in animal husbandry and improved nutrition. More available meat meant more protein in women’s diets, hence improved fertility, while a technology as basic as the introduction of iron cooking pots meant that women suffered less anemia, hence less blood loss in miscarriage or childbirth.47 But these positive trends reversed themselves with the climate change of the early fourteenth century. Even before the Black Death, a series of cold winters and erratic rainfall led to repeated crop failures and famines, reducing fertility and initiating a population decline that became catastrophic with the onset of plague.48 Yet, cutting across such large-scale demographic cycles, certain factors remained relatively constant. Sepsis or puerperal fever, hemorrhage, eclampsia, and obstructed labor caused many deaths,

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while breech birth and other “unnatural” presentations of the fetus constituted medical emergencies. Infant mortality could approach 30  percent—obviously higher in plague years.49 Skeletons “from one of the more deprived areas of eleventh-century Norwich” show that the average age of death for adult women was around thirty-three, and the rate of infant mortality more than 60 percent.50 Even for the privileged, such figures could be alarming. In three years for which Florentine records happen to survive (1424, 1425, and 1430), 20  percent of all married women who died in that city succumbed to the risks of childbirth. A study of English ducal families between 1330 and 1479, at the most privileged stratum of society, showed that about 36 percent of boys and 29 percent of girls died before the age of five.51 It is small wonder, then, that the medieval church regarded childbirth as a pastoral crisis. Hildegard of Bingen perceived it as downright apocalyptic; she says a woman in labor experiences such “terror and trembling” as the earth itself will undergo at the end of time.52 Treatises such as the early thirteenth-century Hali Meidhad (Holy Maidenhood) painted a ghastly picture of pregnancy and childbirth to frighten young virgins away from marriage: Your ruddy face will grow thin, become green as grass; your eyes will grow dim, with dark circles underneath, and your head ache painfully from the turning of your brain; inside, in your belly, a swelling in your womb, which distends you like a water-bag; pain in your bowels and stitches in your side, and your loins will ache very painfully; heaviness in every limb; the burden of your breasts, with your two nipples, and the streams of milk which run out. . . . [E]verything you chew is nauseating; and whatever food your stomach does accept grudgingly—that is, without pleasure—is thrown up again. . . . Worries about your labor pains deprive you of your sleep at night. When it comes to the point—that great, sorrowful suffering, that strong and stabbing pain, that unresting agony, that pang upon pang, that restless groaning—while you labor with it, and with fear of your death, there is shame along with suffering, in the humiliating craft of the old women who are experts about that time of sorrow.53 In 1236, around the time of this treatise, the Council of Canterbury decreed that pregnant women should confess and receive absolution before delivery.54 In this they were much like knights embarking on crusade. This became standard practice in late medieval Europe. As I discuss below, clerics also

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developed prayers and ritual blessings for expectant mothers. Not surprisingly, though, women relied most heavily on folk practices and magical protections. Some of these, such as the application of herbal sachets and gemstones, overlapped with medical recipes. Others dovetailed with religious culture, such as pilgrimage vows, the invocation of saints,55 and the use of prayers and relics as birthing amulets.56 A favorite relic for this purpose was the belt or girdle of a saint. Any saint at all would do, so long as the relic was local and easy to procure. Interestingly, the girdle was a symbol of chastity for both sexes, so its frequent use to assist labor suggests the talismanic power of virginity applied to the rites of fertility. Even more common were vellum birthing belts inscribed with charms, prayers, and excerpts from the Life of St.  Margaret, the patron saint of childbirth.57 Religion, medicine, and magic can be hard to distinguish. A birth charm dating from the tenth century—the earliest text in an archaic form of Occitan— reads as follows: Tomida femina in tomida via sedea; tomid’ infant in falda sua tenea; tomid[a]s mans et tomid[e]s pes, tomidas carnes que est colbe recebrunt; tomide fust et tomide fer que iste colbe donerunt. Exsunt en dolores d’os en polpa [de polpa en curi] de curi in pel de pel en erpa. Terra madre susipiat dolores.

A swollen woman sat in a swollen road; a swollen child she held in her lap; swollen hands and swollen feet, swollen flesh that will take this blow; swollen wood and swollen iron that will give this blow. The pain goes out from bone to flesh, from flesh to skin, from skin to hair, from hair to grass; let Mother Earth receive the pain.58

According to William and Frances Paden, this rhythmic incantation would have been performed to assist in a difficult birth. Katharine Park suggests a violent situation in which, after days of labor, the woman still could not deliver— perhaps because the fetus was too large (“a swollen child”) to pass through a

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slender, youthful vagina. Desperate attendants try to save her life with an operation of last resort—inserting a hook (“swollen wood and swollen iron”) into the womb to dismember the doomed infant and remove it piecemeal.59 A necessary but ominous medical procedure is eased by a charm to set the “swollen,” agonized mother in a healing relationship with Mother Earth. Almost a thousand years after this charm was written, a folklorist in the Auvergne came upon another extraordinary find related to childbirth.60 A family in the town of Aurillac had, for many centuries, cherished a birthing sachet thought to have magical powers. Passed down from mother to daughter for generations and often lent to neighbors, the small rectangular object (125 mm × 95 mm) was said to give women the ability to deliver babies quickly and easily. At last, in the 1920s, curiosity and modernity got the better of tradition, and the owner surrendered the object to a scholar to learn what was inside it. Alphonse Aymar, the fortunate folklorist, stripped away three successive envelopes of fabric from different periods to reach the original packet. Inside was an assemblage of objects and texts dating from the thirteenth through the eighteenth century—a remarkable compendium of late medieval devotion, superstition, and magic. The objects included a minuscule reliquary with fragments of saintly bone; seven rosary beads; a scapular containing more relics; a silk ribbon with an Italian inscription, measuring the height of Jesus Christ; a pilgrimage ribbon from Spain; a tiny figurine of a pilgrim to Santiago de Compostela; a few bits of wax from blessed candles; a necklace with phallic pine-cone tassels; and a collection of six documents on paper and parchment, neatly folded into squares. Among these texts—written in French, bad Latin, and Spanish, several in Gothic script—Aymar found numerous prayers that advertised their own efficacy as amulets; a recipe for a medicinal plaster made of pitch, sulfur, wax, and olive oil; a Passion of St.  Margaret in the local dialect, complete with miniatures; a magic square with the famous sator arepo formula;61 apotropaic passages from the Gospels; letters claiming to be miraculously sent by Christ or the Virgin; a Spanish litany of Marian praises; incantations of the names of God, many in garbled Hebrew or Greek; magical characters said to be efficacious against plague, demons, sudden death, and so forth; and twelve magic circles containing diagrams, each protecting against a specific evil. Difficult labor is but one of the many perils invoked. At some point, however, someone must have gathered all these magical texts and objects, themselves collected over generations, sealed them into a packet, and bequeathed it to her daughter as a priceless heritage. Each woman in childbed, setting this object hopefully over her laboring womb, established links with her own mother and grandmothers

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reaching back to time immemorial; with Christ, the Virgin, St. Margaret, and other saints represented physically or textually in the sachet; with a sacred global community stretching as far as Spain, Italy, and Jerusalem, where several of the texts claim to have been found; and of course, with the many clerics, magicians, and scribes who produced them. These incantations and objects, meant at first to be uttered or worn individually as amulets, came to function in the aggregate, evidently no less powerful—or perhaps even more so—once the owners had long forgotten what the talisman contained.62 But in spite of all that saints, magic, and medicine could do, mothers did die in childbirth, and then the infant’s fate became crucial. A stillborn baby or one that died in utero could not be buried in consecrated ground. Unbaptized, its soul was irretrievably lost. Burchard of Worms’s Decretum (ca. 1023), an early compilation of canon law, decries the practice of burying such an infant with a stake through its heart to allay fears of its returning as a ghost or vampire.63 A later case, from Aix-en-Provence in the thirteenth century, mentions a pair of stillborn twins thrown into a stable atop a heap of manure.64 If the mother herself died in labor, she could not be buried in the churchyard until the infant had been removed from her womb, dead or alive. Hence, in the later Middle Ages, it became common to perform posthumous Cesarean sections. Odo of Sully, bishop of Paris from 1196 to 1208, was the first to recommend this procedure in the hope of baptizing the fetus before it died—for it was not expected to survive for more than a few minutes. Soon afterward the Council of Canterbury (1236) mandated the practice.65 It was important first to ascertain that the mother was truly dead (there was no question of sacrificing the mother to save the child)— but then the midwife must be prepared to spring into action, knife in one hand and holy water in the other, so to speak.66 A few late medieval surgeons described Cesareans in their textbooks, but this operation on the dead was regarded throughout the era as more a pastoral than a medical procedure.67 Parish priests instructed midwives on the rite of emergency baptism, a sacrament deemed so necessary to salvation that it did not have to be performed by a priest, or even in Latin. If the fate of an immortal soul was at stake, a vernacular formula would do.68 John Mirk (fl. ca. 1380–1420), an English pastoral writer, opined that even a half-born child could be christened as soon as its head and neck had emerged from the womb.69 In the unlikely event that it lived, a priest could always “complete” the sacrament later with anointing, exorcisms, and the vows of godparents.70 But the liminal role of midwives in this life-ordeath situation gave them considerable power—and also placed them in danger, for they could easily be blamed if anything went wrong.71 One offense of which

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they were sometimes accused was a compassionate one, that of baptizing a stillborn infant while claiming it had been alive—in order to assure its salvation and Christian burial. Parents could be so desperate to lay their infants in consecrated ground that at least one church built walls around its cemetery and locked the gates at night to prevent clandestine burials of the unbaptized.72 So dismal did their fate appear that theologians in the thirteenth century carved out a special place in the afterlife to mitigate it—the “limbo of children,” an anteroom of hell where such infants, though deprived of the beatific vision, suffered no other torments.73 But emergency baptism could also be sought for legal reasons. If a wife died before producing a living heir, her husband would have to return her dowry to her natal family. So his female relatives, attending a fateful birth, might exert extreme pressure on the midwife to baptize a stillborn child, as if to certify that it had been born alive. The urgency of baptism is responsible for the peculiar category of “respite miracles,” which emerged in the early thirteenth-century pastoral revolution stemming from Fourth Lateran. Like postmortem C-sections, these miracles became common in the late Middle Ages, testifying to increased lay concern with the necessity of christening. Such tales report stillborn infants reviving long enough to receive baptism, thanks to the intervention of a saint, before dying again. In a study of about 150 miracles pertaining to conception, pregnancy, and childbirth, Pierre André Sigal found fifty-six cases in which parents prayed for a miracle concerning a stillborn child. Only thirteen begged the saint for the baby’s life, while forty-three prayed instead for a baptismal respite.74 Not surprisingly, such prayers were offered considerably more often if the infant was male. A few saints, like the obscure Philippa of Chantemilan (1412–51), seem to have specialized in this type of miracle. But for students of hagiography, what stands out is the apparent lack of any supernatural event in these stories. An infant is born with no apparent signs of life; its frantic parents pray desperately to their saint of choice; someone sees or imagines a movement in the little body, perhaps a flicker of its eyelids; a midwife quickly splashes it with water and utters the baptismal formula; and in almost half the cases, the dead baby is once again a dead baby. In the rest, Sigal reports, it survives for a few more weeks or months. But whether the infant’s death is immediate or delayed, the grateful parents report a miracle. Bereaved, they know that heaven at least has one more citizen—an innocent who, turning the tables, can now pray for their own salvation. The midwife had her tragic moment of heroism when a baby died, if she managed to deliver its baptized soul into heaven. But what if it lived? Then all attention turned to the nurse, for wet nurses acted as surrogate mothers for all

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but the poorest classes. Amazingly, a nurse’s first duty after birth was to give the infant its proper shape. We saw in Chapter 1 that educational theorists viewed a child’s mind as soft wax, ready to take the stamp of teaching. Authorities on child-rearing said the same about its body. Thus Aldobrandino of Siena writes, “Just as wax when it is soft takes any form one wants to give it, so children take such forms as their nurses give them; and for this reason, know that being beautiful or ugly is due in large part to nurses.”75 If need be, a wise nurse could easily stretch or straighten a child’s limbs à douner li bele fourme. Bartholomaeus Anglicus too says that because “the flesh of infants is tender, soft, flabby, and unsteady,” their limbs need to be carefully adjusted.76 The Florentine poet Francesco da Barberino (1264–1348) treats the newborn as a kind of wax doll: come ciera porrai lui trasformare. If the infant’s nose is too flat, it can be raised; if too high, it should be lowered. Too broad a face can be narrowed, a short one lengthened, lips and lashes molded to order, and so forth—but all soavemente, without force.77 There could be no clearer proof of the self ’s fundamental malleability. Whatever a child had absorbed from its father’s seed and its mother’s blood, however the moon and stars had shaped it in utero, it still emerged “raw” from the womb, its very flesh in need of the sculpturing hand of a nurse. But nurses exercised a still greater influence through their milk. Medical writers, noting that pregnancy and lactation could not be sustained at the same time, explained that after birth the menstrual blood was redirected to the breasts, where it was purified and changed into milk. Thus the newborn was fed by the same substance that had nourished it in the womb—and for that reason, a mother’s own milk was better for her child than anyone else’s. This advice was repeated by all the authorities, religious and lay, and reinforced by the ubiquitous image of the Virgin suckling her holy Son. Nevertheless, maternal nursing was the norm only for peasants and women of the urban working class, who might hire themselves out as wet nurses but could not afford to pay them. Thus we find the rare case of a culturally idealized practice associated with the lower classes yet rejected by elites. Shulamith Shahar explains the likeliest reason for this anomaly.78 Conception does in fact cause a lactating mother’s milk to dwindle or dry up, and nursing in turn functions as a limited method of birth control. But the only sure way to avoid conception is to avoid sex, and most couples were simply not willing to do this. The church banned all forms of contraception and insisted on the marriage debt, meaning that a couple could abstain only by mutual agreement. Further, babies were not weaned until the age of about two, so it was unreasonable in any case to expect such a long period of abstinence. Thus, to avoid spoiling their milk and starving the baby because of a

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new pregnancy, mothers who could afford it handed their infants off to wet nurses soon after birth. Despite the religious and medical ideal of maternal nursing, hiring a wet nurse even became a status symbol. But the nurse herself suffered from these arrangements. If she took a child into her home so that she could continue to suckle her own baby, her wage was lower and the nursling more often died. Yet if she moved into the nursling’s home for a higher wage, she was compelled to wean and abandon her own child.79 So, as with most forms of domestic labor, the upper classes exploited the lower. Even when the hiring of a nurse was seen as a necessary evil, immense care and anxiety surrounded the choice of one. Just as adoptive parents today are screened, though biological ones cannot be, a nurse received the fullest scrutiny that circumstances allowed. Aldobrandino specifies that the ideal nurse should be about twenty-five, “the age when the natural heat is strongest to produce good humors.” She should have good color, a pleasing figure (neither too fat nor thin), breasts of moderate size, and above all, robust health, “for sickly nurses quickly kill children.” Her character too must be screened; she should be neither wrathful nor melancholy, fearful nor foolish, because a nurse will pass her vices on to the children she feeds. That is why, Aldobrandino says, philosophers since antiquity have been telling their lords (seignours) to make sure their children are tended by wise and virtuous nurses, or else their noble nature will be corrupted.80 On the off chance that all these conditions have been met, the writer adds still more. The nurse should physically resemble the mother as far as possible; she must have carried her last child to term with a live birth, more than a month but less than a year ago; and—no surprise here—her milk will be better if it was a son. So many criteria are laid out that one can imagine Aldobrandino’s patron (the countess Beatrice of Savoy) interviewing half a dozen candidates for the job—and doubtless she paid better than most. But when it came to hiring a nurse even further down the social scale, moral and medical concerns intersected with anxieties about class. Bernardino of Siena (1380– 1444), the Italian celebrity preacher, agrees that “the child acquires certain of the customs of the one who suckles him. If the one who cares for him has evil customs or is of base condition, he will receive the impress of those customs because of having sucked her polluted blood.”81 Wet nurses became a special point of contention in the tense atmosphere of Jewish-Christian relations. It was apparently common for Ashkenazi families to employ Christian nurses. In the famous bull Etsi Judeos (1205), Pope Innocent III cited allegations he had heard from an unspecified, probably French source about a Jewish custom deeply offensive to Christians. After Easter, the

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only day in the year when the laity received Communion, some Jews allegedly required their Christian nurses to “express milk into the latrine” for three days before suckling their babies.82 Even though laypeople received only the host, not the chalice, according to the doctrine of concomitance they still partook of both Christ’s body and his blood. Since breast milk is in turn processed blood, the Jewish nurslings would have been vicariously participating in what their parents viewed as an idolatrous sacrifice. As Jeremy Cohen remarks, the allegation has been misread to imply that Jews themselves believed in transubstantiation—ten years before that doctrine was even defined at Fourth Lateran! In Cohen’s view, the charge has more to do with “a widespread Christian mentality [that] frequently associated Jews and Judaism with latrines and excrement, on the one hand, and imagined Jews engaging in insidious rituals to undermine the efficacy of Christian sacraments,” on the other.83 Even if a small number of Jews demanded this symbolic rejection of the Eucharist, the latrine ritual was surely not widespread. The pope’s response was to forbid Jews to hire Christian nurses in the first place—again, a ban observed mostly in the breach. But a Jewish source expresses a parallel anxiety. The Or Zarua, a compendium by Rabbi Isaac ben Moses of Vienna (d. ca. 1270), warns that Christian wet nurses must not eat pork or other unkosher foods, let alone feed such things to Jewish children.84 It seems, then, that in at least some eyes a nurse could transmit not only aspects of her character but also her religious identity, to the potential detriment of a child. Nurses were expected to act as surrogate mothers in both pragmatic and emotional ways. “The nurse is instead of the mother,” writes Bartholomaeus Anglicus: So the nurse is glad if the child is glad and sorry if the child is sorry, and taketh him up if he fall, and giveth him suck if he weepeth, and kisseth him if he is still, and gathereth his limbs together if he sprawleth and casteth him abroad, and cleanseth and washeth him if he defouleth himself, and feedeth him with her fingers against his own will. And for he can nought speak the nurse lispeth and soundeth the words, to teach the more easily the child that cannot speak. And she useth medicines to bring the child to convenable state if he is sick. And heaveth him up now on her shoulders, now on her hands, now on her knees and lap, and so she heaveth him up and down if he squeaketh and weepeth. And she shoveth meat in her own mouth and maketh it ready to the toothless child, that he may the more easily

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swallow that meat and so she feedeth the child when he is hungered and pleaseth the child with whistling and songs when he shall sleep, and swatheth him in sheets and cloths, and righteth and stretcheth out his limbs and bindeth them together with cradle bands to keep and save the child that he be not defaced with crooked limbs. She batheth and anointeth him with noble ointments.85 It is hard to imagine a more detailed, affectionate portrait of the tasks involved in caring for a small child—but the caretaker is its nurse, not its mother. It is she who not only feeds the child and shapes its limbs to the proper form but also bathes and swaddles it, changes diapers, pre-masticates its food, rocks it, sings lullabies, and uses baby talk until it has learned to speak. We may speak of the “mother tongue,” but Dante defines the vernacular as the language children first learn “by imitating a nurse.”86 As a surrogate mother, the nurse must follow exactly the same careful regimen as a pregnant woman. Like the expectant mother, she should regulate her emotions and stay on an even keel. According to Aldobrandino, the infant’s parents must take good care of her or (depending on one’s point of view) exercise strict surveillance. A wet nurse should be maintained on good meats (lamb, chicken, the best kinds of fish) but kept away from onions, garlic, and other foods that “produce bad blood.” Her workload should be moderate—not too heavy yet without enervating leisure—and above all, she must “keep from lying with a man, for it is this that most corrupts the milk.”87 As noted above by Bartholomaeus, the nurse should even take the baby’s medicine when it is sick, because strong remedies will be diluted in her milk to a child-friendly dose. An independent treatise on pediatrics notes, “Whatever the child’s illness, caution must be imposed upon the nurse’s diet and so exact a diet must be observed, as if the nurse were suffering from the ailment of the little infant.”88 In short, the same intimate coinherence that had bound the fetus and its mother in one flesh now binds the infant and its nurse. It is small wonder that nurses hold such a prominent place as confidantes in literature, from Marie de France all the way to Romeo and Juliet. Available evidence shows that wet nurses, like mothers, were both idealized and feared. While elite writers such as Bartholomaeus and Aldobrandino assume a situation of privilege, the chorus of warnings that “mother’s milk is best” indicates widely shared worries, especially for children who were put out to nurse away from home. Some of these infants were illegitimate, while others had effectively been abandoned. Like foster parents in our child welfare system today, many nurses doubtless took in children for the extra money, while continuing to

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suckle their own infants and sleep with their husbands. Several studies of children put out to nurse in eighteenth-century France show that “the mortality rate among infant charges in the homes of wetnurses was very high,” and it is not likely to have been lower in the fourteenth or fifteenth century.89 Shahar speculates that many infants sent to be reared in institutions “died of unnatural causes,” such as infanticide and criminal neglect.90 Finally, there is evidence that girls were weaned earlier and more often relegated to foundling homes, where mortality was extremely high. Bernard de Gordon (fl. 1270–1330), Konrad of Megenberg (1309– 74), and pseudo-Arnold of Villanova all state that the female requires less food or can be weaned sooner.91 The merchant writer Paolo da Certaldo (ca. 1320–70) even advises, “Feed the boy child well. . . . Dress the girl child well, but how you feed her doesn’t matter so long as she stays alive. Don’t let her get too fat.”92 Such advice may well account for the “quite unrealistically higher number of male infants than females” in early fifteenth-century Florence.93

Pregnancy and the Liturgy Given the life-threatening character of childbirth, it is predictable that the liturgy should include prayers for pregnant women and safe delivery. What may be surprising is how late they appear. The so-called Gelasian Sacramentary, an important eighth-century liturgical book, includes blessings for a newborn and numerous prayers to reverse sterility, a condition well attested in Scripture.94 But the earliest liturgical prayer for childbirth appears in the eleventh century, well after some of the charms and amulets described above. Found in German pontificals from Eichstätt and Regensburg, it also occurs in an English manuscript of the same era: “O God, who from the beginning created man and gave him a helper like himself, that he might increase and multiply, grant upon earth that this your handmaid N. may give birth successfully and without pain.”95 In the English source, this prayer in liturgical Latin is accompanied by the sator arepo charm, combining magic with a Christian blessing. Indeed, the introduction of such Latin prayers for pregnant and laboring mothers suggests a clerical attempt to Christianize (though hardly supplant) the thriving folk practices around childbirth. A more elaborate prayer, “On the blessing of a fetus in its mother’s womb,” appears in some manuscripts of the influential Rationale divinorum officiorum, composed by the canonist William Durandus before 1286. The blessing, not original to Durandus, was written in Provence around 1300 and made its way

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from Arles into a group of Italian manuscripts. From these origins it gradually seeped into numerous pontificals and other ser vice books, where it remained for centuries.96 The prayer encapsulates a whole theology of childbirth: Lord God, Creator of all things, mighty and terrible, just and merciful; you who alone are good and gracious, the only exalted king, the only just, almighty and eternal One; you who deliver Israel from every evil; who created the chosen fathers, namely Jeremiah, John the Baptist, the glorious Virgin, and various others in their degrees, and sanctified them in the womb with the gift of the holy Spirit immediately after conception, before they were born in the usual way; accept the sacrifice of a broken heart, we beseech you, and the fervent desire of your anxious handmaid, who humbly prays for the preservation of the weak child you have granted her to conceive; and protect your portion, sanctify it with the measureless blessing of your grace, and defend it from all the guile and injury of the dire enemy, and from cruel and wicked adversities of every kind; that, with your hand as midwife, it may come unharmed to the most joyful light of the present life, and serve you perpetually in all things, and merit at last to attain everlasting life.97 Beginning with an august invocation of the deity from the Book of Maccabees, the blessing reminds the Lord that the fetus is sacred to him, for he sanctified at least two prophets and the Virgin Mary in their mothers’ wombs from the time of conception.98 The priest then invokes the mother’s suffering and her devotion. Humbly, with a broken heart (Ps. 50:19), she turns to God with anxiety (anxie) as well as fervent desire. Her fetus, though weak (debilis), is nonetheless a divine gift, deserving its creator’s protection and blessing. Especially interesting is the request that God himself serve as midwife (obstetricante manu tua). In a variant version, the tua is omitted and God is asked instead to bless the midwife’s hand.99 An edition of the Sarum Missal printed in 1527, shortly before the English Reformation, includes some handwritten prayers on the flyleaf to be said at a “Mass for Pregnant Women.” Typical is the Collect: “Almighty and everlasting God, who hallowed the blessed Virgin Mary our mother from her conception and in childbirth, and liberated Jonah the prophet from the stomach of the whale with your strength and power, protect your pregnant handmaid N. and visit her in your salvation, that the child within her may come to the light happily and contentedly, and may be led to the saving waters of health.”100 God is asked to deliver the fetus, like the unhappy prophet Jonah, from the belly where

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it now resides. The prayer reflects a growing desire for scriptural rather than apocryphal sources; Jonah freed from the whale’s belly replaces the traditional patron of childbirth, St. Margaret, who was freed from a dragon’s maw. Like many comparable prayers, this one asks that the child may survive long enough to attain baptism and salvation. Later notes in the manuscript indicate that this Mass was said for the Catholic queen Mary Tudor, who experienced a false pregnancy in 1555. Even more than most royal pregnancies, Mary’s was an affair of state, for if the queen had produced an heir by her husband, King Philip of Spain, England’s religious destiny would have altered for generations to come. In the mid-sixteenth century a very different prayer pro praegnante muliere appeared: Righteous Lord God, who on account of the first woman’s guilt announced and imposed a universal, severe, and inescapable curse upon all women, namely that they should conceive in original sin, be subject in pregnancy to many great torments, and at last give birth at the risk of their lives: in your measureless goodness and inexhaustible mercy, I pray, mitigate the edict of this law. Let your wrath be appeased a little and cherish this woman N., who carries a child, in the bosom of your grace. Help her to overcome her pain without peril to her life, and to deliver a child attractive in body and noble in soul at the proper time; that after she has forgotten her anguish, she may celebrate the grace of your compassion with joy, and bless you unto the ages of ages. Amen.101 In striking contrast to older prayers, this early modern one is startling in its punitive tone. Invoking the curse of Eve (Gen. 3:16), it posits a wrathful God who justly punishes women with the terrible sufferings of pregnancy and childbirth but might—just this once?—take pity and suspend his decree long enough to enable a safe delivery. The speaker’s singular verb (quaeso) indicates a private priestly blessing rather than a public recitation. Remarkably, the prayer even appears in the first edition of John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments (1563), the famous Protestant martyrology, naming “our queen Mary”—again with regard to her supposed pregnancy in 1555. Foxe ascribes the prayer to Hugh Weston (d. 1558), Catholic dean of Westminster at the time, and says he delivered it to schoolchildren, to be said by them twice a day.102 Eventually prayers for childbirth were integrated into a full ser vice of blessing for expectant mothers. It includes a litany for divine protection, sprinkling

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with holy water, and a gospel lesson (John 16:20–24) about the anguish of childbirth and its subsequent joy, which the priest is to read with his stole over the mother’s head. Such prayers and rituals appear in a great many printed handbooks, but it is hard to know how far back they date or how widely or frequently they were used.103 Rubrics indicate that the ritual of “blessing for a pregnant woman who fears a difficult birth” was meant to be performed privately, in the church or sacristy, after the expectant mother had confessed and received Communion. But for “illustrious persons” it might be conducted in homes or domestic chapels. Only parish priests, never monks, are to perform the ritual, and the priest is to use it only when asked. He should take care that nothing immodest be done in his presence, “nor that any superstitious observances be added by common women” (a plebeiis feminis). The mother might already be in labor, perhaps in mortal danger, by the time a priest was called, and these instructions suggest an ongoing dialectic between the church and folk customs. By the fifteenth century, a meeting between two pregnant women had become the subject of a liturgical feast. Luke’s Gospel (1:39–56) tells the story of how, after the Annunciation, Mary hastened into the hill country to visit her older cousin Elizabeth, who after a lifetime of sterility was also pregnant. Elizabeth’s tale recapitulates the many Old Testament stories of barren women—Sarah, Rebekah, Rachel, Hannah, and, in apocryphal lore, Mary’s own mother, Anne— whose miraculous conceptions revealed God’s sovereign power to give or withhold the fruit of the womb. The angel Gabriel had already informed the Virgin of Elizabeth’s pregnancy to strengthen her faith. When the two women met, Mary greeted her cousin, and at once Elizabeth’s unborn child, the future John the Baptist, “exulted in her womb” as he recognized the unborn Messiah. Elizabeth, “filled with the Holy Spirit,” then proclaimed what would become the core of the Ave Maria, the fundamental Marian prayer: “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb” (1:42). Mary replied prophetically with the Magnificat (1:46–55), a canticle sung every evening at Vespers. Rich in human interest, prophecy, and typology, even beyond its importance as a source of Marian prayers, the Visitation was a familiar and beloved story. Surprisingly, however, it enjoyed no liturgical commemoration before 1389, even though many non-scriptural events such as Mary’s Nativity, Assumption, and even Conception already had their own feast days. The Visitation, as the last major Marian festival added before the Reformation, is also one of very few feasts created by papal fiat, with no history of popular observance. Its originator was John of Jenstein (1348–1400), archbishop of Prague. On the basis of a vision, he believed that this new observance in Mary’s honor would inspire her

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to intervene and end the Great Schism, which had begun in 1378. So he lobbied Pope Urban VI and persuaded him to promulgate such a feast. But after Urban died suddenly in October 1389, the project had to be taken up by his successor, Boniface IX. In his bull of 9 November  1389, Superni benignitas conditoris, Boniface established the Visitation as a feast to be observed on 2 July, enhanced with a vigil, an octave, and indulgences.104 Yet Mary did not in fact end the Schism, so observance remained spotty. The feast was popular in Germany, parts of Italy, Scandinavia, Hungary, Poland, and Bohemia, where it originated. But the French obedience did not accept it until it was reestablished by the Council of Basel in 1441. England for some reason did not get the message until even later, when in 1475 the Franciscan pope Sixtus IV again promoted the Visitation—this time to invoke the Virgin’s aid against the Turks. Queen Elizabeth Woodville, the consort of Edward IV, enthusiastically supported the new feast to honor her own patron saint.105 Despite these setbacks, the Visitation attracted devout attention to the sanctified pregnancies it commemorates. Even before 1389, artistic representations of Mary and Elizabeth had become increasingly common, especially in women’s monasteries. In thirteenth- and fourteenth-century art, the two women are often shown in close embrace, with their fetuses clearly visible to the devotee in medallions or, in sculpture, transparent crystals (Fig. 6). These are placed over the heart rather than the womb, in defiance of anatomy, for reasons we will explore later.106 By the fifteenth century, a greater realism emerges and the expectant mothers palpate each other’s wombs, much as living women must have done. The wrinkled, elderly matron, clad in a respectable wimple, contrasts sharply with the youthful Virgin. Yet Mary in her first trimester often looks more conspicuously pregnant than Elizabeth in her second or third, because she carries the more important child (Fig. 7). As devotional objects, these statues, altarpieces, miniatures, and panel paintings hallowed pregnancy and maternity with an aura that, in secular discourse, they rarely enjoyed. Typically for the late medieval church, no liturgical uniformity was imposed or even sought. Poets in fact competed for the honor of composing an office of the Visitation, and by 1400 there were at least four rival ones, all penned by high-ranking churchmen.107 John of Jenstein’s original office, “Exsurgens autem Maria” (1386), was adopted in much of Germany and favored by the Carmelites.108 Adam Easton, the English Benedictine cardinal (1328–98), composed what would become the most widely used office, “Accedunt laudes virginis,” found in Roman ser vice books and parts of England.109 The Dominicans adopted “Collaetentur corda fidelium” by their master general, Raymond

Figure 6 The Visitation. Dominican convent of Katharinental, Switzerland, ca. 1310–20. Attributed to Master Heinrich of Constance. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo: Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Figure 7 The Visitation. Rogier van der Weyden, ca. 1445. Leipzig, Museum der Bildenden Künste. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

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of Capua (1330–99),110 while the Franciscans preferred “Candida plebs fidelium” by Peter of Candia, later the antipope Alexander V (1339–1410).111 As if all these did not suffice, the Council of Basel commissioned a new office, “In splendoribus sanctorum” (1441), from Thomas of Courcelles; this was adopted by the French and picked up in parts of Scotland.112 When Sixtus IV repromulgated the feast, he commissioned yet another office, “Ut vox Mariae” (after 1475). Around the same time the anonymous “Aeterni Patris filius” appeared in England, making its way into the Sarum, York, and Aberdeen breviaries113— although Syon Abbey preferred a variant, “Devota visitatio,” which was known in Italy as well.114 Five more anonymous rhymed offices appear in the Analecta hymnica, for a total of at least thirteen.115 Given that each office had to include chants for first and second Vespers, the lengthy ser vice of Matins with its three nocturns, and Lauds—as well as additional texts for the octave, in some cases, plus sequences for Mass—these compositions represent an enormous outpouring of creativity around the theme of sacred pregnancy. The Visitation offices celebrate all four protagonists of the story—both the mothers and the fetuses, who enjoy exceptional agency. A few snippets will give a taste of the liturgy’s central motifs. Again and again, its poets highlight the gift of the Holy Spirit to Elizabeth and her child, mediated by the pregnant Mary, and the miraculous prophecy of the still-unborn John. As we have seen, the prenatal sanctification of John the Baptist was invoked in prayers for ordinary mothers, hoping to attract God’s grace to their own unborn children. Raymond of Capua points to the mystery of John’s silent, embodied prophecy: Hinc exsurgit Et assurgit Elinguis infantulus Exsultando, Adorando Deum, qui fit parvulus, Ut sanetur Et salvetur Electorum populus.116

A speechless infant Rises up And takes a stand By exulting And adoring God, who becomes a baby That his chosen people Might be healed And made whole.

The unborn John, doubly speechless (elinguis infantulus is a pleonasm), salutes the unborn Jesus with his first prenatal kicks. If Elizabeth’s child shows precocious wisdom, prophesying even before he can speak, the silent Word who embodies language has renounced it, making himself deliberately small (Deum,

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qui fit parvulus) for the salvation of his people. This image finds an echo in vernacular devotion. In the apocryphal Histoire de Marie et de Jésus, a popular French fiction, the unborn Baptist not only speaks but even performs liturgical gestures in the womb: Saint Jehen, qui estoit a nestre, Conut son seignor et son mestre. Il se dreça sor ses .ii. piez Et puis si s’est agenoilliez; Ses .ii. manetes, qu’il avoit Dedenz le ventre ou il estoit, Vers son seignor les estendi Et puis si lor cria merci. “Sire,” dist il, “bien viegnes tu Qui m’as doné tant de vertu Que je me puis ceeins drecier Et retorner et aiesier. Or sai je bien certenement Dedens mon cuer parfitement Que es venuz ta gent saver Et des granz penes delivrer.”117

Saint John, who was not yet born, recognized his lord and his master. He raised himself up on his two feet and then knelt down. His two hands, that he had within the womb where he was, he extended towards his Lord, and then cried mercy. “Lord,” he said, “you are welcome, you who have given me so much strength that I can stand up in here and turn and take my ease. Now indeed I know certainly and perfectly in my heart that you have come to save your people and to deliver them from great pain.”

Fetal personhood may be the most striking point of such verse, but the mothers’ friendship is celebrated too. In one of John of Jenstein’s sequences, Novo novus gratulatur, Mater matrem amplexatur, Totum Deus voluit.

Child congratulates child, Mother embraces mother— And God has willed it all.

Eia, audit illa illam Matrem Dei et ancillam, Haec eam similiter.118

See, now Elizabeth hears Mary, God’s mother and his handmaid, And Mary hears her too.

While the rhymed offices celebrated the mystery in verse, prose lessons spelled out its theological meaning. Lessons for Matins were chosen partly from Scripture,

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partly from patristic sermons, and the preferred choices for the Visitation were homilies by Origen, Ambrose, and Bede.119 Here is the selection from Ambrose: We should note that the superior comes to the inferior to help the inferior: Mary to Elizabeth, Christ to John. . . . Notice the precision and the propriety of each word. Elizabeth was the first to hear Mary’s voice, but John the first to perceive grace. She heard in the natural order; he exulted by reason of the mystery. She perceived Mary’s coming; he, the coming of the Lord. The woman recognized the woman, the child the Child. The mothers spoke of grace, the infants caused grace to operate within their mothers; they set the mystery of faith in motion in the meeting of their mothers. And through a twofold miracle, the mothers prophesied by the spirit of their children. The infant exulted; the mother was filled [with the Holy Spirit]. . . . [Elizabeth said:] I perceive the miracle, I recognize the mystery: the Mother of the Lord is pregnant with the Word, she is filled with God.120 All three homilists posit an intimate coinherence between mother and infant: the divine Spirit that fills Jesus and John overflows onto Mary and Elizabeth. The Baptist, Origen proclaims, knew before he was born what Israel did not yet know, so he leapt for joy: “He sensed that his Lord had come to sanctify his servant before he came out of his mother’s womb.”121 In this way Elizabeth too was sanctified. As the precursor of Christ, John began to exercise his ministry even before birth. Again the personhood of the fetus is robustly affirmed, as is hierarchy: the males (though unborn) outrank their mothers, and the maid outranks the matron. Both women are proposed to the faithful as role models, as is the unborn John. A late fourteenth-century treatise sums up the objects of contemplation: “the conspicuous joy of Mary, the exultant Virgin; the fruitful speech of Mary, the welcoming Lady; the cheerful ser vice of Mary, the dutiful handmaid; the noble prophecy of Elizabeth, the inspired old woman; the manifest signs of Christ, the incarnate Godhead; and the stupendous portent of John, the human being who came to meet him.”122 Clearly the feast announced a new sanctification of pregnancy, but we might wonder if the Visitation held any lessons for everyday mothers. Ambrose had addressed his exposition to virgins, while Bede wrote for monks, but vernacular homilies take us closer to the lay public. An English sermon, added by

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Caxton to his 1491 edition of Mirk’s Festial, lists three reasons Mary visited Elizabeth. The first was to share her joy, the second “to doo her seruyce & helpe her in her nede.” Like the church fathers, the English preacher holds it to be “a grete mekenesse that the moder of God, quene of heuen & erthe,” should have traveled so far by such a “cumbrous waye” to “salute & serue an olde wyfe.” But her visit affords an example to contemporary women: “Here specially wimmen ben taughte for to be attendaunt and seruysable in the tyme of a childys byrthe. For euery woman wyth childe berith a precyous tresour in her wombe, that is to say, the soule of the childe & his life. Bernardus . . . all this worlde maye not telle the pryce of one soule. Thenne wo shall be to theym that knowyngly destroyen children in their moders wombe, for the childe shal neuer see the face of God.”123 After citing Bernard, the preacher adds Augustine’s warning that the destruction of one soul is a greater sin than that of a thousand bodies. Abortion, then, is sinful not merely because it kills a child but because the fetus dies unbaptized, so its soul will be lost. This warning is of a piece with the postmortem Cesareans performed solely in the hope of baptizing a doomed infant before it died. Even single mothers who committed infanticide received lighter penalties if they baptized the child before killing it.124 But abortion is not an exclusively female sin; it also covers miscarriages caused by domestic violence. “Also those men that euyl entrete their wyues with childe, as betyng, or tredyng hem vnder her fete, or trowblinge theim wyth their vncurtoys langage, sinne greuously, & moost greuously yf the childe perysshe therby.”125 The casual reference to husbands treading their pregnant wives underfoot is telling. Such behavior might even have been intended to terminate a pregnancy, if a man felt he could not support another child, but it could also have been habitual abuse. In one of Jacques de Vitry’s sermon exempla, a drunken husband kills a child in utero with his fetid breath, and in another, babies are stillborn because of what we would call marital rape too close to the wife’s due date.126 In the Middle English romance Athelston, an evil king kicks his pregnant wife for resisting an unjust decree; she goes into labor at once and delivers a stillborn son.127 The Distaff Gospels, like the Visitation sermon, observe that if a husband beats or tramples his pregnant wife, “she will deliver with great difficulty, and often she is at risk of losing her life.”128 Given the delicacy ascribed to pregnant women, who were so often warned to avoid shock, anger, and sadness, even a husband’s “uncourteous language” might be thought to cause a miscarriage. If it did, the offender was guilty of mortal sin. Is it too optimistic to hope that this feast in

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honor of two expectant mothers might have meant a little more respect, a little less abuse, for their living sisters?

Pregnant Minds, Pregnant Souls The first “spiritual pregnancy” occurs early in Christian history—around 55 c.e., when St.  Paul calls the Christians of Anatolia his “ little children, with whom I am again in travail until Christ be formed in you” (Gal. 4:19). In a famous 1982 book, Caroline Walker Bynum showed how twelfth-century abbots used such images of motherhood to talk about spiritual direction and governance, grounding their self-image in perceptions of Jesus himself as mother.129 A related but distinct topos is even more widespread: the practice of imitatio Mariae, or giving birth to Jesus in one’s heart or soul just as Mary did in the flesh. As Hugo Rahner has demonstrated, this theme is ancient and pervasive in both Greek and Latin church fathers, continuing in a robust medieval tradition that culminates in Meister Eckhart.130 Witnesses are legion, but the most influential figures are Origen, Ambrose, and Augustine. For early Christian writers, the sowers of the word are preachers like Paul; the believer’s heart or mind is the womb; and the offspring is Christ or some virtue, such as faith or fear of the Lord. In a third-century homily, Origen remarks: “A soul that has recently conceived the Word of God is called a pregnant woman. We read about such a conception in another passage of Scripture: ‘we have conceived in the womb from your fear, O Lord, and given birth’ [Isa. 26:18]. . . . The Word of God can be seen as a fully formed infant in the heart of a soul that has followed the grace of baptism and clearly, manifestly conceived the word of faith.”131 Yet not every pregnancy comes to term, as St. Ambrose warns. Many souls conceive the Word: “But not all give birth, not all are perfect, not all can say, ‘We have delivered a spirit of salvation on the earth’ [Isa. 26:18]. Not all are Maries who can conceive Christ by the Holy Spirit and give birth to the Word. For there are some who miscarry the Word before they can give birth; there are others who may have Christ in the womb but have not yet formed him. . . . Who then will show me Christ’s parents? He himself revealed them by saying . . . ‘Whoever does the will of my Father who is in heaven is my brother, and sister, and mother’ ” [Matt. 12:50].132 Spiritual pregnancy, then, is a metaphor for the whole Christian life. The “conception” corresponds to the moment of conversion or baptism, while the “birth” takes place repeatedly whenever

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a believer performs the works of faith, bringing Christ into the light by living righteously in accord with the will of God. Apostates and bad Christians, however, miscarry and fail to produce a living child. Underlying this topos is an older Platonic metaphor, which similarly represents the mind as the womb of thoughts. In the Theaetetus, Socrates tells his interlocutor that the youth is in labor with an idea for which he, Socrates, can serve as midwife. Though a midwife may herself be barren or no longer fertile, she can discern whether a woman is pregnant, induce labor, calm the mother’s pain, and finally deliver a healthy child.133 The Greek fathers and perhaps the Greekliterate Ambrose would have known this dialogue, although it was not transmitted to the medieval West. Nevertheless, the equation “mind = womb” became central to Neoplatonic thought, including the Christian Platonism of Augustine and all who followed him, firmly establishing the soul (fem. anima) as a mother. Replacing the teacher/midwife figure was the “sower” of the divine seed, who might be a preacher, a spiritual director, or God himself. The heavenly offspring, Christ, could alternatively be identified as virtue, good works, or salvation. Augustine never tired of this theme, making it a cornerstone of his Mariology. If the Virgin alone bore Christ in the flesh, every Christian can and must bear him in the spirit. In a Christmas sermon the bishop exhorts, “What you marvel at in the flesh of Mary, enact yourselves in the depths of your soul. Whoever believes in the heart for righteousness conceives Christ; whoever confesses with the mouth for salvation gives birth to Christ [Rom. 10:10]. By this means fertility will abound in your minds, even as virginity abides.”134 Mary herself, after all, received Christ in her mind by faith before she conceived him in her flesh by grace. Augustine even claims that she was “more blessed” in the first than in the second.135 Thus he interprets the saying of Jesus, who responded to the praise “Blessed is the womb that bore you” with a corrective: “Blessed rather are those who hear the word of God and keep it” (Lk. 11:27–28). Mary’s obedience to the Word is the true source of her blessedness, and unlike the virgin birth, her faith is not hard to imitate. Hence Augustine preaches in another sermon: “His mother bore him in the womb; let us bear him in our hearts. The Virgin became pregnant with the incarnation of Christ; let our hearts become pregnant with the faith of Christ. She gave birth to a Savior; let us give birth to praise. Let us not be sterile; let our souls be fertile for God.”136 This message applies to all Christians without exception. Over time, however, it was addressed especially to consecrated virgins, since they were constantly exhorted to take Mary as their model. In the twelfth-century Speculum virginum, for example, the teacher reminds his female student that “it is greater to conceive and give

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birth to Christ in the spirit,” after Mary’s example, “than to bring forth children in the flesh who are going to die.”137 Metaphorical pregnancy and birth are, as usual, privileged above the ordinary kind. This becomes even clearer when the topos is applied to monks or priests. Abbot Guerric of Igny (d. 1157) tells his monks that once they have conceived such a glorious offspring, they must not harm the tender fetus with any outward shock or blow (offensa), nor ingest anything to make them abort the child they bear “in the womb, that is, the mind.”138 Guerric echoes Ambrose, but also the medical advice given to pregnant women, who could not be too careful about their regimen. He plays slyly on the word “venter,” which meant both “belly” and “uterus.” Eating anything harmful thus stands for allowing a poisonous substance, that is, a sinful thought, into the mind/belly of the soul, where it might in turn destroy the fetus in its spiritual womb/mind. But if any Christian could conceive this Child, priests could do even more. In a way, they could even bear Christ “in the flesh,” more fully imitating Mary. An oft-quoted twelfthcentury text (sometimes ascribed to Augustine) compares the priest, who brings Christ’s body into the world at every Mass, to the woman who was the first to do so: “O the awesome dignity of priests, in whose hands the Son of God becomes incarnate as in the Virgin’s womb!”139 Taking that lesson to heart, a priest known to Caesarius of Heisterbach had so much devotion that when he approached the altar for Mass, his venter felt like a wineskin ready to shatter from new wine (Job 32:19), and he experienced such vigorous movements in his heart (corde) that he thought it would burst.140 This sounds very much like late-term pregnancy, with the pressure of an actively kicking fetus. More decorously, Friedrich Sunder (1254–1328), the Dominican chaplain of Engelthal, asked Mary before every Communion to let her Child be born in his soul, “which often happened.”141 The persistent tension between heart/mind and womb/belly, grounded in Neoplatonism, has a wide range of metaphorical uses. By abstracting and intellectualizing the sacred “pregnancy” of faith, the venter, id est mens topos makes it freely available to men, who do not have wombs, as well as virgins, who do not bear children.142 The theme gives Mary’s uniquely fruitful virginity a universal application, not setting her on a lonely pedestal but holding her up as supremely imitable. Unlike a physical womb, a spiritual one can remain pregnant indefinitely without discomfort. It can give birth repeatedly or else, in a different construction of the metaphor, shelter the divine fetus as long as life lasts, turning the moment of death into a triumphant birth. Finally, a pregnancy of this sort means that the beloved offspring need never be separated from its parent, who can painlessly give birth again and again with no risk to his or her life. The

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flexibility of the topos is evident in the contrasting cases of Hadewijch of Brabant and Meister Eckhart. Little is known about the life of Hadewijch (fl. 1240s), a beguine poet and mystic. But she is thought to have written all her works chiefly for the beguines of her community—including her Mengeldichten (Poems in Couplets), which are short treatises of spiritual direction in verse. Poem 14 presents its reader or listener with an allegory of pregnancy divided into nine months, each linked with distinctive virtues and spiritual exercises.143 Despite this topic, as well as the gender of both author and audience, Hadewijch uses a gender-neutral he for the spiritual seeker, the “perfect man” (volmaectelike) who desires to “obtain perfect Love” (volmaecte minne, vv. 25, 40). Conversely, this Love (Minne) is normally a feminine persona, a goddess-like figure of the Divine, who is apparently both the cause of the pregnancy and the Child to be born.144 Neither “Jesus” nor “Christ” is mentioned, although Mary is named twice. Hadewijch’s poem combines a traditionally non-gendered imitatio Mariae (an allegory of spiritual growth) with a clearer than usual sense of pregnancy as a process that occurs in female bodies. The devotee who desires perfect Love should sink low in humility, the virtue that “brought God down into Mary” (41), and in consequence will “receive [God] and carry him for as long / As a child grows within its mother” (45–46). The first month of pregnancy will be devoted to “faithful fear,” the second to “joyful suffering,” and so forth, until “in the ninth month is born / The Child that lowliness had chosen” (139–40). In general, the poem is an allegory of the religious life. The first month is explicitly compared to monastic profession (50–54), in which the soul imitates Mary’s act of submission with the words “ecce ancilla domini” (62; Lk. 1:38). As the seeker progresses through this pregnancy, s/he grows in the practice of asceticism, patience, self-control, mystic sweetness, confidence, justice, and wisdom, always striving to content Love and obtain fuller knowledge of her divine being. Most of this allegory could easily be recast as a Ladder of Virtues, or any of the other schemes for mapping spiritual progress that were popular at the time. On the other hand, the temporal frame is unique to pregnancy, and there are a few hints of corporeality. In the second month, patience causes the womb to “grow and dilate” (75), and in the fifth, quickening seems to occur as the soul becomes conscious of its “most sweet burden” (94), as well as “the severe pain that Love brings about” (96). In the ninth month, the Child finally comes to term “in that great place / In the depths of lowliness, in the heights of love, / Where with all, in every way, / The soul lives for God with all power” (144–47). Here, in lieu of the expected womb, we find “an abstract and infinitely open expanse which

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encompasses the parent as well as the child.”145 That space is not so much the “mind” of the conventional pregnancy metaphor as a paradoxical realm where magnificence and lowliness meet; the most humble becomes the most exalted. Although a birth takes place, it is decidedly strange, even anticlimactic, for Hadewijch does not end her poem at that point. Instead she moves on to another, more compact set of allegories: each month of the pregnancy has four weeks, and each week, seven days, signifying yet more virtues. The last virtue, “holy fear” (185), circles back to the “faithful fear” (47) with which the pregnancy began, so it looks as if the whole process is beginning all over. As Annette Volfing observes, in spite of the understated moment of birth “the subject somehow also carries on being pregnant (i.e. growing and expectant)” because s/he can never truly be separated from Minne, who is both the Child and the divine Beloved.146 Further, the allegory reverses expectations in that the mother, rather than the fetus, is the person actually growing. This idea of a permanent pregnancy is already implicit in the traditional metaphor. Either no birth ever takes place on earth or the birth is continually repeated as the devotee remains continually pregnant. But Hadewijch develops her allegory at much greater length, emphasizing its temporality, so what usually remains implicit now becomes emphatic. This didactic poem lacks the experiential air that we find in both Hadewijch’s poetry of divine Minnesang (Stro­ phische Gedichten) and later women’s accounts of mystical pregnancy. Far better known was Meister Eckhart (d. 1328), whose teaching on the eternal birth of God in the soul gave the ancient metaphor its greatest depth, as well as its broadest influence.147 But in the process, he transformed the concept so radically that nothing remains of the kind of spiritual pregnancy described by Hadewijch. For Eckhart, the eternal birth of the Son in the soul is an ontological event that depends on God alone. It has nothing to do with a soul’s conversion, faith, works, or growth in virtue—even though a person’s awareness of that birth does depend on his or her openness to God in such ways. But the Father’s generation of the Son, an eternal and primordial act, entails the generation of all creatures in and as the Son. This act takes place not in some metaphysical no-man’s-land but in every soul: The Father gives birth to his Son in eternity, equal to himself. “The Word was with God, and God was the Word” (Jn. 1:1). . . . 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 other wise. He must do it whether he likes it or not. The Father

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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.148 So profound is Eckhart’s sense of the coinherence of all creatures in and with the Son that he preaches, “God bears his Only-Begotten Son in you, whether you like it or not. Whether you are sleeping or waking, he does his part.”149 If we fail to “taste” this divine presence, it is only because we lack the salt of divine love, and our tongues are coated with the impurity of created things. The soul can no more prevent the divine Birth than it can bring it to pass; God alone acts. The soul’s part is to be purely passive, abandoning all works and “ways,” or religious exercises, to enter the state of detachment that Eckhart called Gelas­ senheit, a serene resignation. The Dominican does allow a place for imitatio Mariae. Like Mary, the seeker of God ought to be a virgin—not literally, but “a person who is free of all alien images, as free as he was when he was not.” In this pure emptiness, a soul can consciously receive God—and the verb “receive” (enphâhen) also means “conceive,” so here we do have an image of spiritual pregnancy. To be fruitful, however, such a soul must be not only virgin but “a virgin who is a wife . . . free and unpledged, without attachment; she is always equally close to God and to herself.” In this soul that is a virgin wife (just as in every other soul), God “bears” the eternal Word from his own inmost ground. But she in her purity can bear with him; thus she “brings this fruit and this birth about, and every day she produces fruit, a hundred or a thousand times, yes, more than can be counted, giving birth and becoming fruitful from the noblest ground of all.”150 To produce divine fruit, however, essentially means getting out of God’s way—giving up any attachment even to prayer, fasting, almsgiving, or other good works, so as to remain absolutely open and available in each moment to God’s will. So the fiction of a divine pregnancy evaporates because, instead of the nine-month gestation that Hadewijch lays out, the conception and birth are simultaneous, happening a thousand times a day—as often as the soul can maintain its radical openness to God. Like so much in Eckhart, therefore, the image deconstructs itself, leaving the great mystic strangely marginal to our account of pregnancy-as-metaphor. We have traveled a long way from the world of actual mothers—of swelling wombs and wailing infants, midwives and wet nurses. After traversing this history

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of a religious metaphor, it is easy to agree with Andrew Galloway that “such spiritual and intellectual pregnancies constitute pre-lapsarian, even god-like, ideals for . . . male intellectuals.” By contrast, “real pregnancy, birth, and the reproductive power of women stand as the mark of the excluded and fallen.”151 In other words, this looks very much like another version of the familiar male appropriation of female fecundity. Nevertheless, women in the late Middle Ages found ways to reappropriate the topos. Even as artistic depictions of the Visitation evolved from visible fetus medallions over the heart to realistically portrayed pregnant women, the ancient metaphor of spiritual pregnancy underwent a parallel shift toward a distinctively late medieval experience of mystical pregnancy. This new phenomenon is more affective than allegorical; it is decidedly gendered (as spiritual pregnancy is not); and it reinserts particular bodily experiences of motherhood, nursing, and childcare into what Meister Eckhart had made a touchstone of unitive mysticism for Everysoul. Unlike spiritual pregnancy, the mystical kind is not a prescriptive metaphor but an experiential reality, which we meet in hagiography and the rich literature of women’s revelations. For devout women of the later medieval period, mystical pregnancy was a way to encounter Jesus through intimate, bodily union—a form of what Rosemary Drage Hale has called “mother mysticism.”152 Ida of Leuven, the thirteenth-century beguine-turned-Cistercian whom we have already encountered as a mind reader, experienced many strange bodily events and sensations. Her Vita, written on commission by an author who had not known the saint, relies on a jumble of notes left by her confessor, so what we read there is an edited, third-hand redaction of her own narrative. Once when she was still a beguine, sharing her bed with a guest, Ida was meditating on the feast of the Epiphany, which commemorates the gifts of the Magi to the Christ Child. As she dwelt lovingly on thoughts of the holy infant, Ida felt that her heart could not contain her joy, which suddenly overflowed: “The individual members of her body began wondrously to swell to so monstrous a hugeness” that her body filled the whole bed, forcing her companion to shrink away to one side.153 Then suddenly, or so at least she felt, Ida disappeared entirely, rapt in a vision of Mary fondling her Child. Some time later, after she had become a nun, Ida again experienced this phenomenon. She had just received Communion when “suddenly her body began outwardly to expand and spread, on account of the spiritual repletion that she was experiencing inwardly in her mind.”154 The writer does not use the term “pregnancy” for either event, nor does the swelling seem limited to Ida’s belly; yet the connections are suggestive. On the first occasion, her “sudden corpulence” is inspired by thoughts of the newborn Christ

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and opens onto a vision of him in his mother’s arms, while on the second, Ida has just received him into her own body. Holy women often saw visions of the Christ Child in the consecrated host; to partake of Communion was to take the Holy Child quite literally into one’s flesh and blood.155 It seems unlikely that an outside observer would have perceived any “monstrous hugeness” suddenly altering Ida’s body. Rather, she herself felt “full enough to burst,” as the saying goes, with her sense of Christ’s presence, and that sensation became for her a somatic experience not unlike the heaviness of late pregnancy. Nevertheless, it is odd that Ida was once accused of being pregnant by a friar in the most ordinary way. The incident is a strange one, not at all formulaic, which the hagiographer recounts at length.156 During an illness brought on by Communion, Ida receives daily visits for weeks from a Dominican friend, who comes ostensibly to discuss Scripture. He is always discreet (or indiscreet) enough to lock the door of her chamber, close the shutters, and leave his socius waiting outside! Predictably, the friar’s companion assumes they are having an affair; Ida’s “sickness” must be pregnancy. He spreads this rumor until a third friar, a physician who prides himself on his ability to detect pregnancy by examining a woman’s eyes, goes to visit Ida with that intention—first telling a recluse, a mutual friend, about his suspicions.157 Although her shutters had been closed because her sensitive eyes could not bear light, they now miraculously fall off the windows, leading Ida to veil herself. The friar then asks her to unveil, but he will not tell her why until she learns, by direct revelation from the Lord, that he suspects her of pregnancy. At this she unveils, passes her eye exam, and strangely enough, is restored to health the very next day. When the recluse tells her why the friar had come, supposedly after the fact, Ida is “reminded” of the revelation that she had already forgotten. Christ then comforts her by materializing, aptly enough, as the divine Infant in her arms. Of course, the writer means to present her as a calumniated virgin, but he doth protest too much; this pileup of suspicious details compels a reader to ask if she had in fact been pregnant. More likely, she may (like Mary Tudor) have experienced a false pregnancy, which can be brought on by intense desire. This would be consistent with her tendency to respond to feelings of spiritual joy with psychosomatic swelling. The truth is unknowable, but the proximity of this tale with two anecdotes of mystical pregnancy suggests the complex imbrication of body and spirit in such cases. Most of our evidence about mystical pregnancy comes from Germany, which produced (or at any rate preserved) the most abundant sources. Lukardis of Oberweimar (ca. 1262–1309), like Ida a Cistercian nun, was a stigmatic prone to ecsta-

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sies and Christomimetic pains.158 Her hagiographer describes her as sickly, simple-minded (multum simplex . . . et sensu hebes), and unable to read; yet because God chooses the simple to confound the wise (1 Cor. 1:27), he distinguished her with many graces. One Christmas, as Lukardis wondered whether the Virgin Mary had really escaped the discomforts of pregnancy and the pain of childbirth, her body answered the question for her: “As she turned these things over in her mind, in an instant she did not sense but saw her belly gradually swelling like a pregnant woman’s, as it were, then suddenly (vehementer) diminishing. And at once she saw a little boy of royal aspect, the fairest of the sons of men; and she did not feel his weight on her body or her coverlet as he ran playfully here and there, delightful beyond measure.”159 From this joyful experience she knew that, just as she had felt no pain or heaviness in her vision, the Blessed Virgin must have had “incomparably less.” Here a mystical imitatio Mariae confirms a cherished doctrine: Mary’s childbearing was indeed painless, unlike any other. A little later, the Dominican Christina Ebner (1277–1356) dreamed at the age of twenty-four that she was pregnant with Jesus, so filled with grace that it suffused her whole body. Like any expectant mother, she moved as cautiously as she could to avoid harming her fetus, until she gave birth without pain. So great was her joy that she rushed into the refectory to show the newborn Christ to her sisters—whereupon she awoke.160 Sisterbooks, the communal hagiographies composed by Christina and other fourteenth-century German Dominicans, “attest literally hundreds of visionary experiences in which nuns give birth to the Christ-child, nurse him, bathe him, and offer him a variety of maternal affections.”161 The nursing visions are of particular interest because in them, nuns play the role of wet nurses for the mother of God. As we have seen, the wet nurse held a unique role as surrogate mother; the fragile infant was thought to imbibe her virtues or vices, her character and class, even her religion, along with her milk. So when pious women received the infant Jesus from his mother and joyously nursed him, they understood themselves to be feeding the Child with their own substance, body and soul, just as they in turn fed on him in the Eucharist. Such visions, as one would expect, occurred most often at Christmas. During the solemn Mass of Christmas Eve, Mechthild of Hackeborn (ca. 1241–98) received the “luminous little baby” from the heart of God in a vision and carried him around the whole choir. “Reclining on the breast of each sister, the Child kissed their hearts and sucked three times from each one. The first time he sucked in all their desire; the second time, their good will; and the third time, he sucked into himself all the labor they had done in chanting . . . and other spiritual exercises.”162 At Engelthal, Adelheid Langmann (1306–75) received the Child from his

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mother, “the sweet queen Maria,” one Christmas and held him most of the night; “he sucked at her little breast and stayed with her until they sounded Matins.”163 By Adelheid’s day, such experiences could be furthered by interaction with material objects—life-sized wooden figures of the infant Jesus, complete with elaborate cradles.164 On the day after Christmas in 1344, Margaret Ebner (1291– 1351), a nun of Maria Medingen, was thrilled to receive the gift of “a lovely statue from Vienna—Jesus in the crib, attended by four golden angels.” In her devotional performances, this wooden Child often came to life in revelations that engaged all the senses. Margaret had frequent conversations with the Child, and once, as she “saw Him with lively animation joyfully playing in the crib,” she asked, “Why don’t you behave and be quiet and let me sleep? I tucked you in nicely.” But the Child said no, she must pick him up and hold him—“so with desire and joy I took Him out of the crib and placed Him on my lap.”165 When he demanded the breast, Margaret was glad to comply, and as a reward felt the touch of his mouth on her naked heart. Her maternal experience was also one of profound spiritual transformation. “My desire and my delight are in the suckling,” she relates, “that I might be purified by his pure humanity, set on fire by his ardent love, and flooded through and through with his presence and his sweet grace.”166 She and her Dominican sisters would have been familiar with Meister Eckhart’s teaching on the birth of God in the soul, and they might well have thought that experiences like these fulfilled it. Yet their material, corporeal piety strikes a very different note from his apophatic counsel to remain “ free of all images.” Though we usually think of nuns as consecrated virgins, medieval convents also enclosed widows, chaste married women, and their children. As Nicole Rice points out, religious vows blurred the boundaries: professed wives and widows became honorary virgins, while all nuns as brides of Christ were effectively—even legally—married women.167 So the convent was not hermetically sealed from maternity and childcare. Nevertheless, the most famous instances of mystical pregnancy occurred in women who were not nuns but widows who had given birth to many children: the prophet and monastic founder Birgitta of Sweden (1303–73) and the Prussian anchoress Dorothea of Montau (1347–94). Both have been controversial figures, though for different reasons. Birgitta, a wealthy aristocrat related to the Swedish royal family, bore four sons and four daughters to her husband, Ulf Gudmarsson, in a marriage that—unusually for a saint—seems to have been rather happy. Also unusual was the fact that six of their eight children lived to adulthood. After Ulf died in 1344, Birgitta became a Franciscan tertiary, received a divine call to prophesy, and in 1350 arrived in Rome, where she spent the rest of her life. She was canon-

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ized in 1391. But, thanks to the Schism and the fierce opposition of Jean Gerson, her sainthood did not immediately “take”; it had to be confirmed by the Council of Constance in 1415. For good measure, her daughter Catherine (d. 1381) too was canonized, in 1484. Dorothea, an utterly different personality, belonged to the artisan class and spent most of her life in Danzig (now Gdansk).168 We encountered her exchange of hearts with Christ in Chapter  3. Miserably married at sixteen to a swordsmith, who abused her, Dorothea disliked motherhood because it interfered with her churchgoing. Nevertheless she bore nine children, of whom four died in infancy and four more in a plague of 1383 (the surviving daughter became a nun). Her spiritual life was distinguished above all by the variety and intensity of her sufferings, which were extreme even by fourteenth-century standards. Vying with Dorothea’s late husband, Christ once asked his bride, “If I didn’t torment you and abuse you, how would you know that I was your Bridegroom?”169 He compared himself to “a strict, severe husband” whose wife is so afraid of him that she dare not leave the house.170 In 1393, just over a year before she died, Dorothea chose to be literally locked in her house. Enclosed as an anchoress, she formed an intimate bond with her confessor, Johannes Marienwerder, who spent the next ten years writing serial Vitae about her. These finally led to her canonization, but not until 1976—prompting the celebrated novelist Günter Grass to respond at once with a hostile fictive account of her life.171 Unlike Dorothea, Birgitta was a loving and attentive mother, though the survival rates of their large families may also reflect class differences.172 A year after her widowhood, the Swede was staying at the Cistercian male monastery of Alvastra, where her husband had died. On Christmas Eve, 1345, she experienced a “great and wonderful feeling of exultation . . . in her heart,” as she felt a living Child turning around and around in it. Two of her confessors, Prior Petrus Olavsson and Canon Matthias of Linköping, were present and could both see and feel this miraculous movement in her body. As Birgitta would later record, the Virgin appeared to her during Mass and assured her that she had conceived Christ in the very same way: “Just as you do not know how this feeling of exultation came so suddenly to your heart, so too my Son’s coming to me was wonderful and swift. As soon as I gave my consent to the angel who announced to me the conception of God’s Son, I immediately felt something wonderful and alive in me. When he was born from me, he came forth from my untouched virginal womb with an indescribable feeling of exultation and a wonderful swiftness.”173 In separate revelations, Christ implicitly contrasted this divine conception in Birgitta’s heart with ordinary pregnancies, produced by “a little

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seed that is nothing but rot,” and told her that from then on she should bear him “many children . . . , not of the flesh but of the spirit.”174 For Birgitta, the mystical pregnancy was a key turning point. She had been mourning her husband for more than a year, and at the time of this experience her oldest child was about twenty-five, her youngest only eight. Because of their wealth and privilege, she had reason to fear that they might succumb to worldly temptation and live sinful lives. But Birgitta’s encounter with Mary and the infant Jesus persuaded her that this love for her children, even if she cared more for their souls than their bodies, was nonetheless inordinate. Her calling as a divinely commissioned prophet now had to supersede her duties to her family; in Claire Sahlin’s words, henceforth she would “make the world her household.”175 But this did not mean she must totally neglect her children. Rather, she and the Virgin would be comadres, for Mary promised that she herself, “Maria Joachimsdotter, who is the mother of God, would be like a mother to the children of Ulf and Birgitta.”176 More than once, the Virgin even cast herself as a midwife. For instance, Birgitta’s eldest daughter, Märta, was betrothed to a man chosen by Ulf, despite Birgitta’s disapproval. The saint was pregnant at the time, and her grief and anger over this wedding were so intense as to endanger the baby, according to contemporary thinking. In fact, Birgitta relates that the fetus actually spoke to her during prayer, begging her to calm down and save its life—so the frantic mother resigned herself to the marriage lest her unborn child should die unbaptized. The fetus lived, but the birth was a difficult one. Birgitta survived only because the Virgin came to her during labor and touched every part of her body, easing the delivery.177 Later on, Mary played midwife again—this time to a soul being born into the otherworld. When her adult son Karl Ulfsson died of tuberculosis, Birgitta agonized over his fate because he had lived such a worldly life.178 So Mary came to console her after the fact: “I acted like a woman helping another woman as she gives birth, helping the baby so that it does not die from the flow of blood and so that it is not suffocated in that narrow space through which it comes out. . . . That is how I acted. I stood near your son Karl shortly before he gave up his spirit. . . . I also helped him in such a way in that narrow space, I mean in the departure of his soul from his body, so that he would not suffer such pain at death that it should cause him to waver or despair in any way, and so that he should not forget God at his death.”179 This anecdote is one of many suggesting that Birgitta perceived a continuity between physical and spiritual childbearing. Her imitatio Mariae led her to an extraordinarily public life, which to her meant “birthing” Christ by making him

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visible in the world through her prophetic words and actions. Like any public life, even today, her mission required her to spend less time with her family than she would have liked. The Virgin reconciled her to that sacrifice by assuming yet another role, that of mother-in-law, to which she was entitled because Birgitta had married her Son. Just as aging parents transfer the burden of household chores to their new daughter-in-law, Mary explained, “now that God and I have grown old in human hearts and their charity is cold toward us, we want to indicate our intentions to our friends and to the world through you.”180 Despite Birgitta’s conviction that (as the Speculum virginum had taught her) it is better to conceive Christ in the heart than to bear flesh-and-blood children in the womb, she saw no fundamental opposition between the two. Rather, she used her extensive experience of pregnancy and motherhood in the world to enrich her understanding of spiritual maternity. Around 1500 the nuns of Vadstena, the abbey she founded, were taking her as their model precisely in her motherhood. A liturgical book from the abbey, copied in 1502, shows that the account of their founder’s mystical pregnancy was read to the sisters in Swedish at Christmas, followed by an exhortation that they in turn should become spiritual mothers—nursing, warming, kissing, bathing, and rocking the infant Christ through their virtuous deeds.181 Birgitta’s revelations are saturated with maternal language and comments about her children, but this is unusual even for the rare holy women who had any. More typical in that regard is The Book of Margery Kempe, which scarcely mentions her brood of fourteen. Dorothea too had little to say about her children, all but one of whom died before she met Marienwerder. Richard Kieckhefer writes, “There is certainly no hint in her vitae of fondness for her husband or children; the death of most of her children was little more than an opportunity to undertake pilgrimages.”182 In fact, Dorothea’s refusal while pregnant to mitigate her ascetic practices, especially her fasting, must have weakened her offspring, for an expectant mother who ate no meat would surely have been malnourished. She did nurse her own children, a sign of her relatively low social status—but she also burned her nipples with a candle when each baby was six months old, not a practice that Aldobrandino or Bartholomaeus Anglicus would have recommended.183 Rather than chiding Dorothea, however, we should take her behavior as an index of what late medieval piety thought that God wanted. Griselda-like, she proved her obedience by her suffering and willingly sacrificed her children to the cause.184 Paradoxically, in the very age that developed such tender, even sentimental piety around the Madonna and Child, the church’s theologians, hagiographers, and saints overwhelmingly believed that God preferred pain, sickness, self-denial, and sacrifice to the devoted childcare

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that medical writers commended. Dorothea, like Angela of Foligno, Margery Kempe, and other “maternal martyrs,” had internalized these values and acted accordingly.185 In his vernacular Vita, Marienwerder even dares to propose her as a model for the married laity. God wanted his bride to have “a human bridegroom,” he says, “so that the state of marriage, as it is approved and confirmed by the church, might be still further confirmed and sanctified by the holy life of God’s children who are married.”186 Just as an exchange of hearts with Christ in 1385 had made Dorothea his bride, mystical pregnancy made her his mother. Marienwerder touches on this theme at numerous points in his oeuvre, and he explicitly compares her experience to Birgitta’s.187 The Swedish saint was canonized just as Dorothea was establishing herself in the town of Marienwerder; she knew of her cult, viewed her relics in Danzig, and even had a vision of her.188 So it is not surprising that Dorothea, though illiterate, recounted a grace echoing Birgitta’s Christmas experience. “In her heart there was a swift, nimble leap as great as if there were a living fetus in her. Or rather, she really felt its movement and kicking, the movement of a living spiritual fetus. These kicks of the fetus were most delightful to her, not at all painful.”189 That joyous sensation, felt in the heart, is of a piece with the whole tradition we have examined. Dorothea experienced it often, but usually the womb (uterus) is the organ mentioned. Sometimes a swollen sensation is accompanied by spiritual delight, inspiring her to long for the Eucharist.190 Sometimes Christ tells her in an Eckhartian mode that she “must become fruitful” by him.191 In imitation of Mary, her soul magnifies the Lord as he magnifies himself in her body.192 At other times, her womb with its mystic burden feels “as full and distended as if her skin would burst,” recalling the burden Christ bore on the cross.193 Though mystical pregnancy is mentioned frequently, one omission is striking. Unlike many women who shared that experience, Dorothea is never shown nursing or playing with the baby Jesus. Childcare, it seems, was one experience she was not eager to relive, even on the spiritual plane. The fullest account of her mystical pregnancy is an intensely painful, visceral one, recalling the physical pregnancies that had been so unwelcome to her. While the Bride was praying devoutly around noon, the Bridegroom by his marvelous working made her womb grow as large as if she had in it an unusually large living fetus, close to the hour of birth. Her sex (natura) was weighed down more heavily by its gestation and pressure than if she had been carrying a huge natural child in her womb. Because of the anguish she suffered from its weight and pressure, she

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didn’t know what to do—how she should turn around, sit or lie down, stand or walk. Nor did she know what she could or should be carrying that could oppress and weigh her down so much. Indeed, she felt greater pressure than if she had been about to give birth in the natural way. The Lord said to her, “I have come to you in glory with violent charity, wishing to do great violence to your body. Indeed, I want to give birth to myself in your soul. And how could my bride know that she had conceived me or is bearing me, if I did not grow and enlarge myself in her?” In this enlargement of her womb, the Lord used to draw her powerfully toward eternal life, and so he did for that time. For in this way burdened nature (natura) grows feeble and its powers are weakened, but the spirit and its powers are strengthened.194 As always in this corpus, it is difficult to tell whose speech we are hearing. Dorothea ventriloquizes the voice of Christ, but Marienwerder speaks for both, and his own words are all we finally have.195 Still, however he may have prompted her memory or redacted her narrative, it is altogether characteristic of her God to “do great violence to [her] body.” That is what love means to Dorothea. Further, Marienwerder alludes to one of the works that shaped his construction of her: Richard of Saint-Victor’s influential treatise, On the Four Degrees of Violent Charity. Like the Victorine, the Prussian theologian liked to anatomize the many forms of divine love, each experienced by Dorothea with a different form of pain. In this case, even though she feels heavier than a woman at the onset of labor, she claims not to know what the oppressive burden could be until the Lord tells her: it is he himself. Just as he had earlier taken her heart, he now appropriates her womb—violating her body to strengthen her soul. Marienwerder’s final comment is revealing, for natura denotes both nature in the broad sense and the sexual organs in particular. So mystical pregnancy burdens Dorothea’s “nature,” yet by precisely that means “the spirit and its powers are strengthened.” Her sense of being immobilized, not knowing “how she should turn around, sit or lie down, stand or walk,” is consistent with Dorothea’s choice to dwell in an anchorhold, where her body had little space at all to maneuver. The themes of spiritual and mystical pregnancy thread their way throughout medieval piety—never dominant, yet never absent. In the early church, “conceiving” Christ was one of many metaphors for conversion or baptism, which left the newly Christian soul pregnant with the Word of God. This feminized soul might “give birth” either morally through the performance of good works, or anagogically at the moment of death, after Christ had been fully

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formed in a soul now ready for paradise. By the twelfth century, monks and especially nuns, as dedicated brides of Christ, were encouraged to imitate Mary, taking tender care of the divine fetus growing within them. To avoid miscarrying the Holy Child, the expectant soul had to avoid the poisonous drink of sin and the shocks of worldly upheavals. Hadewijch represented the spiritual life as a permanent pregnancy, sustained by steady growth in virtue until the Child finally came forth in a flood of overwhelming love—only to be conceived anew as the cycle began again. For Meister Eckhart, God the Son is eternally, continually born in every soul—but also as every soul, for the mystic understood the Father’s eternal generation of the Word as a metaphysical act inseparable from the creation of the world in and through the same Word. To become conscious of this eternal, divine birth within oneself, one must attain perfect detachment and Gelassenheit, becoming a “virgin wife” so as to collaborate with God in bearing this holy fruit. Spiritual pregnancy thus becomes a metaphor for enclosing the Infinite, birthing the Eternal. Eckhart represents the apogee of mystical abstraction in the development of this theme. In the late Middle Ages, even as Eckhartian thought was widely diffused (and diluted) within devout circles, our theme also took a countervailing material turn, just as the motif of exchanging hearts evolved from pure metaphor toward disturbingly literal instances of the inscribed heart and the eaten heart. Mystical pregnancy, especially in the practice of Cistercian and Dominican nuns, was a psychosomatic experience linked with spiritual jubilation: women physically felt a sensation of swelling in the womb or a lively fetus kicking in (or beneath) the heart. Sometimes this sensation was so strong that they were sure those around them could also perceive the Child’s movement or the signs of pregnancy in their flesh. Such experiences actualized an intense devotion to the Virgin and the infant Jesus, which also expressed itself through visual and tactile performances of nursing the Christ Child. Life-sized statues of the Holy Child and cradles for rocking him, made of wood or even precious metal, were popular devotional objects in fourteenth-century Germany. By interacting with these objects, even as they enjoyed visions of receiving the Child from his Mother at Christmas and suckling him, nuns took on the emotionally charged role of wet nurses to the Holy One. Not only did this role entail a satisfying intimacy with Jesus and Mary. Because of the formative character ascribed to breast milk, it also involved a quasi-eucharistic exchange between the holy infant and his devotee. In the sacrament, the devout received Christ’s own blood; when they nursed him as a baby, he received theirs, along with all their love and desire.

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Birgitta of Sweden carried imitatio Mariae to its furthest extent. Through mystical pregnancy and prophetic teaching, she became a mother to Christ, while Mary in turn served as surrogate mother to her six children to assuage her pain at abandoning them. The Virgin even played midwife at the birth of the saint’s youngest child and at the death of her son—like a modern “death doula.” A generation later, Dorothea of Montau imitated both Mary and Birgitta, but with a difference. A fertile but reluctant mother who outlived eight of her nine children, she experienced mystical pregnancy as both joy and pain. While Birgitta shows how the experience of real maternity could enrich (and be sanctified by) an age-old metaphor, Dorothea, at least on Marienwerder’s insistent telling, reinforces the demand to choose between flesh and spirit at its starkest.

The Eternally Pregnant God In pursuing these metaphors and experiences of spiritual pregnancy, we are not merely exploring a quirky medieval devotion, for the equation “mind = womb” applied first of all to God. The topos turns out to have far-reaching theological consequences. Just as the human mind could be imagined as a womb of ideas, the divine mind was represented as the womb of creation, the matrix of the Platonic forms, in which the archetypes or exemplars of all creatures reside forever. Mystics of many stripes, including Hadewijch and Meister Eckhart, have understood the soul’s “virtual” or “pre-”existence in the mind of God as its most real existence, whereby it remains permanently united with the Divine before, during, and after its span of embodiment on earth.196 Thus God is, so to speak, pregnant with the world, as well as each individual creature, before it comes forth in time. The roots of this theology extend back to the earliest days of Christianity. In the prolific works of Philo (ca. 20 b.c.e—ca. 50 c.e.), an Alexandrian Jew contemporary with Paul, allegorical exegesis of the Septuagint undergirds a biblical Platonism that had profound influence, less within Judaism than on Christian thought.197 Philo’s “second God,” called Sophia (Wisdom), is virtually identical with the divine mind (Nous) of Middle Platonism as well as the Word (Logos) of the Fourth Gospel. John’s prologue famously states that this Word was with God from the beginning yet also is God (John 1:1), establishing a key postulate of Trinitarian theology. Church fathers used the Johannine prologue, read through a Philonic or Platonizing lens, as an interpretive key to several passages in the Old Testament. In the process they developed a

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theology of coinherence in which metaphors of divine pregnancy and childbirth play a central role. One such passage was Psalm 109:3 (Vulg.), in which God the “Father” speaks to the Son: Tecum principium in die virtutis tuae In splendoribus sanctorum Ex utero ante luciferum genui te. With you is the beginning in the day of your power, In the splendor of the holy ones; I bore you from the womb before the morning star. In Hebrew, as a modern gloss informs us, this verse “is unusually corrupt,” and its meaning “can no longer be recovered with certainty.”198 Hence English versions vary widely, but none resembles the Vulgate, one of Jerome’s inspired mistranslations—inspired by the beliefs I have just outlined. Accurate or not, the verse sparked extensive reflection on God’s childbearing. Genui in itself is a gender-neutral verb (“generated”), but when modified by ex utero it must be translated as “I bore,” not “I begot.” Patristic writers—including Hilary of Poitiers, Jerome, Ambrose, and Augustine—all used this text to argue that the Father truly gave birth to the Son. Indeed, God the Son was born twice: once in eternity from the Father, once in time from the Virgin. The notion of his divine birth was further cemented by the Nicene Creed (recited every Sunday at Mass), which states that he was “born of the Father before all ages” (ex Patre natum ante omnia saecula). Interestingly, the Latin text of the creed renders a genderneutral term in Greek (γεννηθέντα) with natum, which specifically denotes birth from a mother. At times the church fathers correlated Psalm 109:3 with other texts such as Genesis 49:25 and Isaiah 46:3, which refer to the womb and maternal breasts of God. They explained the psalm’s anthropomorphic language in the same way they accounted for God’s eyes, hands, and so forth, unfazed by the ascription of a (metaphoric) female anatomy to the Divine. As Shannon McAlister demonstrates in her fine study God the Mother? God the Daughter? The Medieval Ques­ tion, the imagery of Psalm 109:3 was variously taken to prove that the Son was of one substance with the Father, being a “natural” rather than adopted child of God; that the mystery of his generation was, like a woman’s womb, invisible and hidden; and that “God does what Mary does,” producing a child without a part-

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ner.199 The same verse supplied the liturgy with a powerfully expressive gradual for the midnight Mass of Christmas, the occasion on which so many devout women saw visions of the Christ Child or mystically nursed him. The infant they cherished on Christmas Eve had come forth from his Father’s womb as well as his Mother’s. This interpretation of Psalm 109:3 (along with another favorite text, Proverbs 8:24–25, on the primordial birth of Sophia) inspired yet more speculation in the high Middle Ages about the birth-giving God. Such scholastic masters as Anselm, Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, and Bonaventure continued to affirm the maternal childbearing of the Father, though stopping short of the label “Mother” because they did not want to ascribe female passivity and belatedness to God.200 Yet figuratively, it is a mother who speaks: “I bore you from the womb before the morning star.” And, like every divine action, her “bearing” of the Son is qualified with eternity. The performance of the psalm verse at Christmas suggests that Mary’s pregnancy not only makes God the Son visible; it also manifests the timeless pregnancy of God within time and space. In bearing Christ in and from her body, the Virgin imitates the divine, eternal Parent—as believers consequently imitate her. Mary’s swelling womb thus provides a visual, corporeal analogue for both the mind of God and the heart of the believer—a parallel invoked by theologians from Clement of Alexandria in the second century through Eckhart and beyond. In becoming mother of the Word, Mary becomes after God the mother of all creation, which dwells archetypally in the Word. This extension of the metaphor to the Virgin implies the further idea of a reciprocal pregnancy. For Mary, like all creatures, dwells eternally within the mind/womb of God, even as God dwells temporally in the mind and womb of Mary. As we saw earlier, Augustine taught that if she had not first received Christ by faith in her mind, she could never have borne his flesh in her womb. The same reciprocity applies to God the Father and God the Son, as Jesus himself states: “I am in the Father and the Father in me” (John 14:10–11). Coinherence in this strict sense is hard to imagine, but metaphors of reciprocal pregnancy furnished one way to unpack the paradox. Mother Juana de la Cruz (1481–1534), a Spanish Franciscan abbess and mystic, expressed it rather elegantly in her 1509 sermon on the Trinity (delivered, like all her sermons, in ecstasy as she purported to speak for God). The Father, she proclaimed, conceals his Only-Begotten Son in his breast like a pregnant woman, who carries her invisible child wherever she goes. But after she gives birth, the child can be seen by all—just as the Father gives birth to the Son and makes him visible whenever a priest utters the words of consecration.

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(Since the twelfth century, as we have seen, it had been a commonplace that the priest imitates Mary, because Christ becomes incarnate in his hands at Mass just as he did in the Virgin’s womb.) Mother Juana completed her symmetrical formulation by claiming that in the host itself, Christ is pregnant with the Father, for in that form he encloses the Father within himself.201 Unlike most of Mother Juana’s sermons, this one aroused the suspicions of an inquisitorial censor, who blotted out most of it, although it would likely have been tolerated in an earlier age. Of the many formulations of this theme, the most fully developed and the best known today is one that had little currency in the Middle Ages, that of Julian of Norwich (1342–after 1416). Julian weaves every strand of the pregnancy metaphor into her intricate theology of divine motherhood. The second person of the Trinity, she writes in A Revelation of Love, “is oure moder in kind [nature] in oure substantial making, . . . and he is oure moder of mercy in oure sensualite taking.”202 In other words, Christ is naturally our mother in creation, since our “substance” or essential being dwells eternally in the divine Mind or Word. In this sense, he is pregnant with us until we are born into eternal life. In a different sense, Christ is the “mother of mercy” through his incarnation because he assumed our “sensuality,” or empirical being, in order to redeem us. During this life on earth, each believer is reciprocally pregnant with Christ who dwells in glory, though invisibly, in the city of our soul.203 But Julian goes still further. Like some others before her, she represents Christ’s Passion as his divine childbearing, a painful labor that ended in death.204 Jesus “traveyled [labored] into the full time that he wolde suffer the sharpest throwes [throes] and the grevousest paines that ever were or ever shalle be, and died at the last.”205 Having endured the worst ordeal ever faced by mothers, the risen Christ breastfeeds the newborn with the sacraments (in the person of Mother Church) and continues his maternal activities in the teaching and discipline of the faithful. Pregnancy figures again in Julian’s contemplation of Mary, the universal mother: “Thus oure lady is oure moder, in whome we be all beclosed [enclosed] and of her borne in Crist. For she that is moder of oure savioure is mother of all that ben saved in our saviour. And oure savioure is oure very moder, in whome we be endlesly borne and never shall come out of him. Plentuously, fully, and swetely was this shewde [in an earlier revelation]: ‘We be all in him beclosed.’ And he is beclosed in us.”206 This text says a great deal in its deceptive simplicity. First, and unsurprisingly, Mary as mother of Christ is mother of all Christians. This is standard orthodox teaching, although Julian is unusual in emphasizing the universal pregnancy of the Virgin (“in whome we be all beclosed”) rather

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than her nurturance or her prayers. Second, Jesus himself is the true (“very”) mother; the maternity of Mary is only an image and likeness of his. Third, this divine pregnancy is perpetual, much like the soul’s pregnancy in Hadewijch and patristic authors. With a uniquely English play on words, Julian suggests that we are “endlessly borne” in Christ yet also “born”—constantly given birth, or renewal of life, and at the same time forever carried in the womb, inseparably one with God.207 Finally, this pregnancy is mutual and reciprocal, as we have already seen: all souls are “beclosed” in Christ, and he in them. Paradox abounds, as Julian employs concrete metaphors to express dizzyingly abstract ideas. One more key passage from A Revelation of Love is often misunderstood: “This fair, lovely worde, ‘moder,’ it is so swete and so kinde in itselfe that it may not verely be saide of none, ne to none, but of him and to him that is very mother of life and of alle. To the properte of moderhede longeth [belong] kind love, wisdom, and knowing; and it is God. For though it be so that oure bodely forthbringing [birth] be but litle, lowe, and simple in regard of oure gostely [spiritual] forthbringing, yet it is he that doth it in the creatures by whom that it is done.”208 Julian is sometimes thought to be disparaging earthly mothers, for she indeed says that “alle oure moders bere us to paine and to dying,” whereas Jesus alone “bereth us to joye” and eternal life.209 But this is an a fortiori comparison, not an oppositional one. Even if giving birth in the flesh seems “ little, low, and simple” compared to giving birth in the spirit, the difference is one of degree rather than kind. More important, however, “it is he that does it in the creatures by whom . . . it is done.” This is an exceptional claim: Jesus acts not only like a mother but also in and through mothers. Taking Julian at her word, all pregnancy, childbearing, nursing, and childcare are divine actions, performed by the very women so often denigrated as mere “carnal” mothers. Maternity is thus a special case of the abstract principle articulated earlier in Julian’s text: “God doth alle thing, be it never so litile. . . . For ther is no doer but he.”210 As several scholars have observed, many if not most anchoresses were lay women, and there is no evidence that Julian had ever been a nun.211 Indeed, if she had belonged to a nunnery, her sisters would surely have cherished and preserved both the tomb and the writings of such an extraordinary member; yet no convent has any record of her. More likely, she embraced the religious life as a widow, as did Birgitta and Dorothea. By the time she experienced her revelations at the age of thirty, she might well have borne and perhaps lost at least one child. As Benedicta Ward points out, a recurrence of the Black Death in 1361– 62, when Julian was nineteen, proved especially fatal to children.212 So did the next epidemic, in 1369. We will never know if Julian was actually a mother, nor

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does the strength of her theology depend on that hypothesis. Yet she alone brings the mystical themes of divine pregnancy and childbearing into such close proximity with the experience of actual mothers. In this way she strikingly unites the Eckhartian tradition with the Birgittine. The Jewish theologian Mara Benjamin, in her thought-provoking book The Obligated Self, “places maternal experience into constructive conversation” with such religious themes as “boundedness, dynamic responsiveness, autonomy redirected or challenged, and contingent power.”213 If medieval writers engaged in such conversations, they were far less intentional, for “carnal motherhood” was, on the whole, not highly valued by intellectuals in this age. It would be all too easy to cull expressions of disdain for pregnancy and childcare, even from the writings of women. Nevertheless, there were exceptions. In medical writings and household books, learned authors did their best to promote the health of expectant mothers and their children. If an infant was not viable, midwives were charged with the august responsibility of saving its soul by emergency baptism, and saints obligingly supplied “respite miracles” to keep some of these fragile babies alive just long enough to receive the sacrament. Clerics, building on older folk traditions, gradually developed a repertoire of prayers and blessings for expectant mothers. When the feast of the Visitation was introduced in 1389, pregnant women—and their fetuses—even gained their own liturgical celebration. Most remarkable of all, from the New Testament onward, the generally devalued relationship of pregnancy supplied a core devotional and theological metaphor. Ambrose, Augustine, and other influential church fathers represented all Christians, including men and virgins, as spiritually pregnant with Christ. Like Mary, priests “gave birth” to Jesus at every Mass when he became incarnate in their hands. In the high Middle Ages, this originally genderneutral topos gave rise to a spiritual practice for women. Nuns and other devout women, being already brides of Christ, fashioned themselves as his mothers through imitatio Mariae and devotion to the Holy Child. Countless religious women saw the infant Christ in their visions, often at the elevation of the host, or received him from his mother to be held, rocked, and suckled. As wet nurses to the Child of Mary, they united themselves with him in a physical relationship as intimate as pregnancy itself, and inseparable from it. A few even experienced the visible, tangible swelling of their wombs in “mystical pregnancy.” Finally, both Christ and God the Father were envisaged as pregnant mothers—continually bearing all creatures in the divine womb, continually giving them birth. Whether to express the coinherence of the Trinity itself, God and the world, Christ and Mary, or God and the soul, no better image

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could be found than the humble, vulnerable bond between an expectant mother and her child.

Coda: Miracle Babies We live in a disenchanted world, we are often told, where miracles no longer happen. Yet tabloid headlines and websites continue to report “miracle babies” and “miracle pregnancies” every week. A random search while I was writing this paragraph turned up the following: “Woman, 40, has ‘miracle’ baby after suffering ten miscarriages.”214 “I found out I was pregnant 30 minutes before my ‘miracle baby’ was born.”215 “Miracle baby girl is born on top of a mango tree during Mozambique cyclone.”216 To encourage struggling couples, the media routinely publish stories of unexpected pregnancies successfully brought to term. Such tales still flourish because, despite the advent of in vitro fertilization (IVF), surrogacy, and other reproductive technologies, pregnancy remains stubbornly fraught and unpredictable. Like Sarah, Rebekah, and Rachel, infertile women still undergo agonies of frustration and disappointed hope. Like Hannah and Elizabeth, women still “miraculously” conceive after years of infertility, miscarriages, unsuccessful treatments, and even chemotherapy. A certain aura, though hardly a supernatural one, still clings to these “miracle” children. Time magazine recently profiled “the world’s first ‘test-tube baby,’ ” Louise Brown, who turned forty in 2018. When Brown was delivered in 1978, journalists from around the world gathered in the small town of Oldham, England, to observe what the same magazine then called “the most awaited birth in perhaps 2,000 years.” Brown’s “test tube,” actually a large glass jar, is today displayed in the Science Museum in London.217 “Baby M,” now Melissa Stern, was the first child successfully born to a surrogate mother in 1986—but the surrogate refused to give her up, provoking a legal cause célèbre. The courts initially upheld the rights of the birth mother, who in this case was also the biological mother, but ultimately sided with the genetic father and his wife, who had signed the surrogacy contract. As of this writing, surrogacy is allowed as a commercial transaction in Russia; banned in China, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and much of Europe; allowed only between relatives in Brazil; and permitted as an altruistic agreement in England, Australia, India, South Africa, and most of Canada. Its status in the United States varies among states.218 Clearly, ethical views of surrogate motherhood remain just as contested as the first recorded contract—that of Abraham, Sarah, and Hagar—which went notoriously bad

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(Gen. 16). Although the practice has produced thousands of happy families, it is also the centerpiece of Margaret Atwood’s feminist dystopian novel (later a television series), The Handmaid’s Tale. In the Middle Ages, both mother and wet nurse were joined in intimate coinherence with the child. Today, a baby can have three “mothers,” each with a valid claim to the title: the egg donor, or genetic mother; the surrogate, or birth mother; and the woman who actually raises the child. It takes a village, as the saying goes. Legal and ethical debates proliferate because, over the course of a mere two or three generations, the developed world has broken the seemingly inseparable bond between sex and fertility. Contraception, abortion, and reproductive technologies have upended long-cherished ideas of what is (or ought to be) “natural,” along with the ancient moral codes founded on those ideas. As usual, ethical consensus and social policy limp far behind the technological advances. Even virgin birth is now technically possible through IVF, though it seems not (yet) to have been tried. Rather oddly, from one perspective, these mind-bending new possibilities have not been friendly to the premise of our medieval tales: the claim that once, and once only, the iron chain binding sex to childbirth was severed by divine decree. Nevertheless, a sense that every birth is “miraculous” takes new parents by surprise every day, while the human appetite for marvels assures that reports of “miracle babies” will continue both to titillate and to console.

Chapter 5

God and the Devil Possessing Souls

Inasmuch as we say and do anything good, this is the work of good spirits, and anything evil, of evil spirits, so that I hardly know any more what I myself am saying. —Richalm of Schöntal, Liber revelationum (ca. 1219) I cannot explain what goes on in me during that time, and how that [evil] spirit unites with my spirit, without taking from me either my consciousness or the liberty of my soul, and nonetheless making another me, so to speak, as if I had two souls, one of them dispossessed of its body and the use of its organs, and it stands to the side, watching the soul that has found its way into my body. These two spirits fight on the same battlefield, which is my body; and my very soul is split. —Jean-Joseph Surin, S.J., letter from Loudun (1635)

Near the end of the Inferno, Dante encounters a shade whose tale is unnerving even for that gruesome place. In the frozen abyss reserved for traitors, Fra Alberigo’s presence astounds the pilgrim because the notorious friar was still alive. Uniquely in the poem, Alberigo explains that even he does not know if he has died yet. For “as soon as a soul betrays as I did, its body is taken from it by a demon, who henceforth governs it until its allotted time runs out.”1 The unhappy soul plunges into the lowest circle of hell, while its living body—now possessed by a demon—continues to “eat and drink and sleep and dress” as usual. Hardly

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orthodox, Dante’s fantasy raises the prospect of a whole class of zombies going about their earthly business, with no one the wiser that they are no longer human. Fra Alberigo actually died in 1307, three years before the French beguine Marguerite Porete. Unlikely though it may seem, the two represent equal and opposite cases of the same phenomenon. For Marguerite was convinced that she too had “died” long before her body was consigned to inquisitorial flames. Her annihilated soul had plunged into the abyss, not of hell, but of the Godhead, leaving God to govern her body—eating and drinking, knowing and willing, and presumably writing the book that got her burned.2 On the one hand, we have a poet vividly imagining demonic possession; on the other, a mystic imagining her own divine possession. Is it possible, in fact, for a human body to be wholly possessed by a supernatural Other? If it is, what then happens to the soul—or as we might say, the person? If not, why did both divine and demonic possession loom so large in the late medieval imaginary?

Irreducible Personhood In the four previous chapters we examined coinherence in a variety of relationships, each more intimate than the last. But all of them have involved ways of forming the self through the other—in education, in pastoral counseling, in erotic love, in pregnancy and child-rearing. This chapter looks at the darker side of coinherence—losing the self in the other. I probe its limits by exploring that point of no return at which communion becomes invasion, the total or partial usurpation of identity by Another. The only Others to possess such terrifying power are supernatural—God and the devil—and the latter mimics the former, so it can be hard to tell their operations apart. That is why discretio spirituum, or “discernment of spirits,” emerged as a key theological discourse in the late fourteenth century. Even under normal circumstances, souls were thought to be subject to supernatural influence at all times. The Holy Spirit (or a guardian angel) inspires the soul to good deeds, while the devil tempts it to sin. By exercising free will, it follows the promptings now of one, now of the other, but normal consciousness remains resolutely earthbound. A soul is rarely aware of these supernatural promptings, and when it is, it can easily tell an angelic from a demonic impulse. So the ego remains firmly in control of body and mind. In extreme cases, however—saints, mystics, the possessed, the mentally ill—the activity of an indwelling Other becomes increasingly perceptible and pervasive, pressing

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the ego to surrender much if not all of its sovereignty to that compelling force. Demons are subtle creatures, so when a soul aspires to radical holiness, they exchange their usual modus operandi—blatant temptations to sin—for more devious stratagems. They can inspire visions and revelations, imitate the voice of God and his saints, work false yet convincing miracles, and suggest seemingly virtuous thoughts that nonetheless lead the unwary soul astray. The late medieval practice of discernment was designed to unmask such demonic pretense, especially in the case of feigned or would-be saints. In this chapter I touch on the literature of discernment, but my primary question is not how to distinguish between true and false mystics, or divine and demonic possession. Much valuable work has already been done on that topic.3 Instead, I seek to know what becomes of the person—the human soul—when the body is (or is claimed to be) controlled by a supernatural Other. My inquiry revolves around three little-known figures: the Cistercian abbot Richalm of Schöntal (d. 1219), the beguine Christine of Stommeln (d. 1313), and the widowed peasant Ermine of Reims (d. 1396). All these unfortunate souls, though devoted to God, experienced life as an endless series of “diabolophanies.”4 In the late Middle Ages the possessed became increasingly visible, at least in our sources if not in actual numbers, as exorcism became a more public, theatrical event. At the same time, a new kind of mysticism came into vogue, using the language of “annihilation” that features so prominently in the thought of Marguerite Porete.5 These new mystics sought “indistinct union” with God, rather than the union of wills that dominated high medieval mysticism, and they made claims for a permanent union with the Divine in which sin is no longer possible because God has taken full possession of soul and body. From one perspective, such cases of divine and demonic possession are strictly parallel—not so much in the behavior of the possessed (although parallels occur) as in the theological stakes of possession.6 Whether confronted with mystical “autotheism,” flamboyantly possessed bodies, or ambiguous cases, theologians arrived at an orthodox consensus. Though they did not explicitly compare mystics with demoniacs, they asserted that in either case the human person remains irreducible and inviolable. Thus a soul can never be truly annihilated in divine union, as Marguerite Porete maintained, nor can Dante’s fantasy of Fra Alberigo in hell become a reality. In the first case, an experience of ecstatic union in which the soul seems to “disappear into God” can only be transient. Habitual divine union (though possible) is instead a union of wills, or moral union, in which the substance of the soul remains intact. Thus any soul’s claim of annihilation in God is a metaphor,

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not a reality. Although a devotee may feel in a moment of ecstasy, or even habitually, that her soul has been brought to nothing, leaving God as the sole principle of her thought and action, this is a metaphysical illusion. In reality, her human personhood remains irreducible. This is the key point of doctrine maintained in the condemnations of Porete (1310) and Meister Eckhart (1329). Although the full list of condemned propositions from Porete’s book is lost, the most notorious—that “the annihilated soul takes leave of the virtues”— depends on a logically prior claim that the free or annihilated “soul is God by condition of Love.”7 It therefore cannot sin and makes no moral effort. Similarly, one of Eckhart’s condemned propositions, cited in the bull In agro domi­ nico, states that “we are totally transformed into God and changed into him, just as bread is changed into the body of Christ in the sacrament. I am changed into him such that he makes me his as one being, not [merely] similar. By the living God, the truth is that there is no distinction.”8 Although both cases were politically complex, the theological point they uphold is clear: God can and will unite the loving soul with himself, but he will not annihilate what he has made. In the opposing case of demonic possession, a similar point is at issue. In a possessed person the soul is held captive by a demon, deprived of the power to speak and act through the body. Hence the demoniac cannot be held morally or legally accountable for anything the demon says or does—whether blasphemy, obscenity, violent crime, self-mutilation, or even suicide. As we shall see, selfharm and attempted suicide figure prominently in the cases of Christine of Stommeln and Ermine of Reims. So well known was the legal principle of impunity that a few enterprising criminals even faked possession to exonerate themselves.9 Further, it was widely accepted that demons could possess only the body and had no access to the soul, as both Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventure had argued. No dissenting voices were heard until the 1520s, and even then, they were rare.10 Every successful exorcism proved that the soul had not been annihilated or (as in Dante’s fantasy) carried off to hell during the possession but remained present within the possessed body all along, awaiting liberation. In short, coinherence has its limits, even though the medieval self is far more permeable than its modern Western counterpart. It is formed by and through others to a degree we may find hard to comprehend. Yet personhood, for all its porousness, remains in principle a stable category. Like the three persons of the Trinity, human persons in and through their coinherent relationships retain their distinct identities, which God will not and a demon cannot destroy. But what are the stakes of this inquiry, and why does it matter? Demoniacs and annihilated mystics, for all the fuss they created, were a tiny sliver of the popula-

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tion, so theological responses to them might seem marginal at best. Yet, as so often in philosophy, limit cases are good to think with. The theologians’ defense of irreducible personhood not only helps to explain the importance of discernment, the heresy charges against Marguerite Porete and Meister Eckhart, and the surprising parallels between radical mysticism and demonic possession. More important, the principle proves essential to the core doctrines of Christian eschatology. The church promises not reincarnation or nirvana, but the communion of saints and the resurrection of the body; not the transience or fungibility of persons, but their forever distinct identity and simultaneous, coinherent union. That is the theological reason—without discounting social and political reasons—that theologians insisted so strenuously on the integrity of the person, even during the most ecstatic mystical union or the fiercest diabolical assault. Demon possession has always attracted interest, but less notice has been taken of a more common form of demonic activity called obsessio. A seventeenthcentury theologian formalizes the distinction between them, which grew out of late medieval demonology: “In obsession, the Demon acts solely on the obsessed persons, though in an extraordinary manner, such as appearing to them often and visibly, willy nilly, striking them, disturbing them, and stirring up passions and strange movements in them, and notably exceeding the reach of their natural . . . faculties, whereas in possession, the Demon takes advantage of the faculties and organs of a possessed person in such a way as to produce, not only in her, but by her, actions that that person could not bring about of herself ” (emphasis added).11 Both terms are military metaphors: obsessio means “siege,” while possessio corresponds to enemy occupation. In siege warfare enemy troops surround a city or castle, trying to breach or undermine its walls while blocking access to food supplies. A town with strong ramparts, able defenders, and ample provisions might withstand even a long siege, but famine very often led to surrender. By analogy, in obsessio the demons harassed their victim not only with temptations but also with a vast array of physical and psychological torments. These could include a barrage of guilty and frightening thoughts, hallucinations, nightmares, temptations to blasphemy and suicide, foul odors, unpleasant noises, poltergeist phenomena, and self-harm, though the injuries were usually ascribed to the demons. “Surrender,” the victim’s complete capitulation, would result in full possession and eternal damnation. As in actual warfare, though, obsession was more likely to wear down its victim through slow starvation. The analogous case would be a gradual psychological breakdown as the obsessed person is starved out of normal life, becoming less and less able to tell

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reality from illusion, carry out her usual tasks, and relate to others in natural ways. Instead, the victim devotes ever-increasing amounts of time and energy to repelling demonic assaults. She might use such means as crossing herself, sprinkling holy water, compulsive prayer, and frequent confession. Yet in warfare sieges often failed, and in demonic obsessio too, the besieged person could be victorious. With luck, exorcism could put the demons to flight. But even if their attacks ended only with the death of the victim, she could triumph if she preserved her sanity and remained steadfast in faith—not a demoniac now but a martyr. Hagiography supplied a perfect model, St.  Anthony the Great (251–356). The Egyptian hermit, styled “the father of monasticism,” retreated to the desert near Alexandria around 270, later taking refuge in tombs and finally in an abandoned Roman fort. During his astonishingly long life, he fought off the demons of lust, acedia, and other temptations and endured physical assaults from demons in the form of wild beasts, who beat him savagely and left him half dead. St. Athanasius’s Life of Anthony, an instant and perennial classic, was one of the best known of all saints’ Lives, gaining even wider diffusion through the Golden Legend.12 In subsequent Lives, combat with demons is almost de rigueur, but it rarely takes such spectacular forms. Hagiographers often deploy this motif to blame the devil for all opposition faced by the saint, including personal, familial, and institutional conflicts. Any temptation or internal struggle can also be presented as a fight with demons. But in the later Middle Ages, the older hagiographic topos returns in force. Demons once again start to appear as quasi-physical foes, appalling the senses and inflicting bodily harm. This growing interest in demons made the dramatic “Temptation of St. Anthony” a favorite artistic subject, with famous examples by Martin Schongauer, Hieronymus Bosch (Fig. 8), and Matthias Grünewald.13 But, like much else to do with demons, the theme is significantly feminized, as we shall see. The three figures I discuss in this chapter all experienced demonic obsessio and described it in detail, though their words were written down by others. They have been treated chiefly in the context of discernment of spirits, so here I attempt my own discernment. My goal, however, is not to determine which (if any) supernatural agents were involved in their ordeals but to probe the danger zone of overlap between unusual religious experience and mental illness. In all three cases, we see personhood besieged. Confronted by a continual onslaught of demons—visible, audible, tangible, malodorous spirits—these sufferers began to lose the everyday, unremarkable sense of identity and agency that most people take for granted. They all knew or feared (as did some who knew them)

Figure 8 The Temptation of St. Anthony. Attributed to Hieronymus Bosch, ca. 1500–25. Madrid, Museo del Prado. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

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that they suffered from mental illness, a category just as available to them as it is to us. But at the same time, each had one confidant convinced that he or she was receiving revelations and enduring demonic torments for a holy purpose. It was these men who recorded the sufferers’ travails in atypical but quasi-hagiographic texts. These peculiar sources all raise the question of discernment by pulling the hagiographic veil aside at odd moments, showing that the putative saints or their associates sometimes doubted either their sanity or their holiness. I will argue that medieval and modern skepticism are not so far apart as we might think. In the first place, the current psychiatric definition of obsessivecompulsive disorder (OCD) stands in direct continuity with medieval obsessio. Only the putative cause has changed, as one historian concisely puts it: “Demons out; nerves in.”14 According to the standard psychiatric manual, the DSM-V, obsessions are “recurrent and persistent thoughts, urges, or impulses that are experienced . . . as intrusive and unwanted, and that in most individuals cause marked anxiety or distress. The individual attempts to ignore or suppress such thoughts, urges, or images, or to neutralize them with some other thought or action (i.e., by performing a compulsion).” Compulsions in turn are “repetitive behaviors . . . or mental acts (e.g., praying, counting, repeating words silently) that the individual feels driven to perform in response to an obsession or according to rules that must be applied rigidly. The behaviors or mental acts are aimed at preventing or reducing anxiety or distress, or preventing some dreaded event or situation; however, [they] are not connected in a realistic way with what they are designed to neutralize . . . or are clearly excessive.”15 The keynote is that obsessive thoughts and actions are experienced as un­ free. Praying for hours on end and counting Hail Marys are not compulsions if the subject wants to be doing these things. But if she feels a rigid, mechanical need to do them because other wise she will go mad or be killed by an evil spirit, the definition applies. The famous Vatican exorcist Fr. Gabriele Amorth (d. 2016) similarly notes a parallel, in fact a convergence, between diabolical and psychiatric obsession. In demonic obsessio, he states, the victim “is subjected to a powerful force that creates mental activity in him that is repetitive, obsessive, and irresistible. . . . The objects of these hallucinations can be manifested as visions, as voices, or as rustlings; they can also appear as monstrous figures, horrifying animals, or devils. In other cases it can be an impulse to commit suicide.” Because “these obsessive disturbances are very similar to mental pathologies,” he advises that even demoniacs who require exorcism should also consult psychiatrists.16

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In the analysis that follows, I do not intend to slap the label of OCD or other modern disease entities on medieval subjects, though I will not hesitate to note symptoms of mental illness. Much less do I wish to belittle their sufferings, collapse the distance between past and present, or reduce religious experience to mental pathology. Nevertheless, I will not read these sources at face value, for I do not share the belief of their authors that actual demons spoke the words and inflicted the wounds that they report. Indeed, there is no reason to think that all or even most medieval readers would have shared that belief. Augustine, whose typology of the three forms of vision was endlessly cited, classified all such apparitions as “imaginative visions,” which can easily deceive and need not be of supernatural origin.17 Although demons often appeared to their victims as embodied creatures, an educated late medieval reader would have known that they are purely spiritual.18 Like unfallen angels, demons can assume aerial bodies when it suits them, but more often they act by manipulating the senses and the imagination to create delusions. Perceiving them in physical form could be one sign that a person was in fact deluded, if not by authentic demons, then by his or her own imagination. Henry of Langenstein, whose pioneering treatise On the Discernment of Spirits (ca. 1383) survives in seventy-nine known manuscripts, warned against both a desire for extraordinary revelations and an obsession with the supernatural that sees demons in every mishap: “We should not quickly and easily believe a spiritual person who constantly labors in fantasy and contemplation. They imagine that they are supernaturally prompted by a good or evil spirit in every impulse they feel, or in everything that happens to them unexpectedly. . . . Yet some people arrive at such credulity and poor judgment in these matters that whenever they hear any noise or tumult in their vicinity, perhaps the random sounds of hidden cats or dormice, they believe and immediately affirm it to be caused by the devil!”19 Langenstein’s warning suggests that such credulitas was not rare, especially among homines spirituales who “constantly labored in contemplation.” His skepticism was shared by two other influential writers on discernment, Pierre d’Ailly and his more famous student, Jean Gerson, whom we shall revisit later. Nancy Caciola’s summary is apt: “For Gerson as for Langenstein and d’Ailly, penitential asceticism could be the beginning of a dark cycle spiraling toward excess, hubris, and insanity.”20 Lack of food, sleep, companionship, recreation, and other physical and social comforts—in short, all the privations accepted by lay penitents and encouraged by many spiritual directors—might lead ultimately to sainthood; but they might also lead to

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madness. Women like Christine of Stommeln and Ermine of Reims, who undertook harsh regimes of fasting, vigils, hair shirts, and the like, are cases in point. Gerson hoped to moderate such female excesses by insisting on strict obedience to a confessor. But as we shall see, an unduly severe, ambitious, or gullible director could exacerbate the problem. It is not anachronistic, therefore, to read the long parade of diabolophanies as imagined rather than real, and to take them as signs of severe psychological distress resulting from—and reinforcing—intense anxiety, isolation, selfloathing, and a perceived loss of agency. Nor is it hard to see the signs of paranoia, delusion, obsession, and compulsion, though these symptoms do not give us license to make a retrospective diagnosis. I will argue that in each of these cases, obsession with (or by) demons bears witness to a selfhood under siege—a progressive loss of the self, invaded by what is felt to be a supernatural Other. But we can also see the immense potential of real human relationships to help or harm in such crises. The abbot Richalm of Schöntal felt the agency of demons in his life to be so ubiquitous that he could scarcely claim his words as his own. Though he was never visibly possessed, his appalling revelations convey a sense of how life might have felt to those who were. Christine and Ermine are both known for enduring spectacular torments at the hands of demons. Yet Christine was ultimately beatified (though not until 1908), while the authenticity of Ermine’s visions stumped even Gerson, medieval Europe’s most revered authority on the discernment of spirits. The terrifying ordeals of these women pose the most acute conundrum: how to distinguish between saintliness and madness? But in their cases we can also see something else: female personhood imperiled less by supernatural Others than by a human partnership gone wrong. Much has been written lately about the ties between devout women and their confessors.21 Such relationships were often mutually productive and empowering, but they could also be deeply problematic. In a profoundly patriarchal culture, the more jealous and obsessive such male attentions became, the more readily a fragile, insecure woman could perceive them as manifestations of love. Christine of Stommeln and Ermine of Reims were both, though for different reasons, deeply vulnerable. I will argue that their confessors—Peter of Dacia, a Swedish Dominican, and Jean Le Graveur, an Augustinian priest— were in part responsible for the women’s demonic manifestations, in which they took such a deep and prurient interest. Torn between the claims of three rivals to possess their souls—God, Satan, and a cleric all too invested in the outcome— the women broke beneath the strain. Christine was ultimately delivered by

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Peter’s death; she led a quiet, demon-free life for the twenty-four years that remained to her. Ermine, perhaps mercifully, endured her torments for barely a year before she was carried off by plague.

A Soul Besieged: Richalm of Schöntal One of the most peculiar accounts of endangered personhood that we have is that of an obscure Cistercian abbot. Richalm of Schöntal belonged to a small, undistinguished abbey near Würzburg.22 Having served as porter, infirmarian, novice master, and twice as prior, he was elected abbot around 1216 and governed until his death three years later. To have held all these offices without scandal, Richalm must have been trusted by his brother monks. He could not have been openly delusional or behaved like a demoniac. Yet the man was utterly obsessed with demons; diabolophanies dominated his entire life. According to his Liber revelationum, penned by a trusted confidant known as Brother  N., the abbot could see their tiny bodies as thick as dust motes in a sunbeam, pervading every corner of the monastery.23 They lurked in the bed of every monk, in the workshops, and in the corridors.24 Organized in a hierarchy parallel to the monks, Schöntal’s demons had their own abbot, prior, cellarer, and so forth.25 The most cunning and powerful were assigned to hinder each day’s celebrant at Mass.26 Much of the abbot’s energy was spent trying to foil these demons, or simply to carry out his duties in the face of their constant harassment. He did this by compulsively signing himself with the cross in a particular way: “I never rest from marking the cross on my face and chest, and especially with my thumb in the middle of my left palm. For this can be easily and aptly done, and it can be concealed when I am with people.”27 It was especially important to cross himself after coughing. Other strategies included tasting blessed salt, sprinkling himself with holy water, reading sacred books, smelling roses, and not least, seeking out Brother N. for therapeutic conversations.28 Virtually all sounds, Richalm believed, were made by demons. To his dismay, he heard these sounds as articulate words.29 If a monk coughed, cleared his throat, spat, belched, cackled, yawned, sneezed, or snored; if he scratched his back, sang off key, fell asleep in choir, or had grumbling in his guts—none of this was his own doing. It was all the work of demons.30 Sometimes an evil spirit would groan through a person’s mouth, mimicking the sounds of pain, to make the person falsely believe he was ill.31 Nature too was replete with demonic voices: they spoke in thunder, in the buzzing of flies, the song of birds,

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and the crowing of cocks.32 Indeed, demons produced even the most innocuous or sacred noises—the sound of a chalice being removed from its case for Mass, of water flowing over the priest’s hands, of the communicant sipping Christ’s very blood. The only exception Richalm would admit was for church bells, well known for their power to banish demons—because those, he maintained, were sounded by good spirits.33 Obviously Richalm suffered from a mental illness. His editor, Paul Gerhard Schmidt, opines that he “was certainly depressive, possibly even schizophrenic.”34 He himself knew that others would think him delusional, for after confiding some of his bizarre beliefs to Brother N., he remarked that if anyone had told him such things even a few years before, “I would have said he was insane and not in his right mind.”35 Even more forcefully, he said he dared not express these opinions to anyone except Brother N., for “if I openly spoke about many of the things that are revealed to me, I would be stoned.”36 Well aware that his brothers would think him mad, Richalm remained sane enough to keep silent about his diabolophanies, sharing them only with the confidant who doubled as therapist and scribe. Even Brother N., who for the most part professed to believe Richalm’s revelations and weighed the possibility of his sainthood, had his scruples. Some of what he writes might seem absurdissima, he admits, yet these few absurdities should not lead us to reject the whole text. So he continues the book he has begun in order to “give the wise an occasion to become wiser—even if none of them can believe all of it.”37 The most striking aspect of Richalm’s experience, from my perspective, is the remarkable porosity of his selfhood. On the ordinary human level, he observed, “often when I am attached to people, . . . I experience their feelings (af­ fectus).”38 If a monk in contact with him felt angry or cheerful, Richalm would find himself sharing the same emotion. But this was more than a gift for empathy. Though outwardly sane and discharging all the duties of an abbot, Richalm had almost no sense of stable personhood or agency. At one point he tells Brother N. that when he sings the Divine Office, his voice is not actually his but a spirit’s (possibly a good one): “My mouth and my lips move, but I am not singing: the spirit sings through my mouth while I am silent. At first I heard those spirits always singing opposite me, wherever I stood in the choir. But now they have drawn near and even sing through me and in me.”39 In fact, he adds, the words he has just now spoken to his friend were not his own, for a demon had borrowed his voice.40 When reading a lesson at Matins one night, the abbot seemed to repeat a word, but actually he uttered it only once; the echo was a demon.41 On a different occasion, he reports, “I was silent and sang nothing,

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but there was a spirit singing out of my mouth; and when he had sung the hour, he was silent, lest I should think that I was singing myself.”42 Demons, in fact, can “use the members of our bodies just as we ourselves do.”43 They can even physically lift a monk and carry him outdoors to distract him from his reading— while the monk imagines that he himself has decided to go for a walk.44 In Richalm’s view of the world, there is little if any room for personal agency: “Inasmuch as we say and do anything good, this is the work of good spirits, and anything evil, of evil spirits—so that I hardly know any more what I myself am saying.”45 At another point, he envisages a radical coinherence between demons and humans. “It is a wonder that they not only speak in our heart, but even through our mouths. Whatever we say that is disorderly, or somewhat wrathful or foolish—they say these things, yet we too are speaking, or seem to be. They have a kind of body superimposed on our body, and as it were infused or poured into it. . . . They themselves are so attached to us and poured into us and superimposed on us like another body, that they can speak through our mouths and act through our limbs.”46 In other words, just as God can be said to act in and through a saint, demons act in and through ordinary people, in an evil yet routine collaboration. The abbot is talking not about spectacular cases of possession but about everyday life. Richalm of Schöntal was clearly—and fortunately—unusual. There is nothing “typical” about his beliefs, which should not be cited as if everyone in the Middle Ages shared them. Indeed, Brother N.’s text anticipates a skeptical response. Yet Richalm’s perceptions do represent an extreme, exaggerated version of the widespread idea we have pursued throughout this book. As JeanClaude Schmitt puts it, in the Liber revelationum we encounter “not psychology as we understand it, but above all an anthropological system different from ours.”47 The self is so profoundly permeable that other persons, including humans, angels, and demons (as well as Christ and the Holy Spirit), can dwell within and act through our own personhood. For Richalm, his sense of demonic coinherence was a living nightmare, which he resisted as best he could. Yet he was not “possessed” in the normal sense of the word. He alone, not those around him, perceived his words and actions to be not his own. Moreover, he formulated his perceptions as a universal theory about the ubiquity of demons, rather than a purely personal affliction. So it will be instructive to distinguish what was generally accepted in the Liber revelationum from its more extreme, indeed unique features. Popular exempla, especially the near-contemporary tales of Caesarius of Heisterbach and Thomas of Cantimpré, take it as given that the world is filled

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with demons. They ceaselessly tempt souls and, in cases of possession, inhabit bodies. Much like Brother N., Caesarius describes the ability to see demons as a “gift” and tells of one abbot who actually prayed for that charism. But once he had obtained it, his visions depressed him so much that he quickly prayed to be rid of the gift.48 Normally, demonic apparitions took place during dreams or else in intense, liminal situations such as thunderstorms, serious illness, or profound contemplation. When demons appeared, they could take virtually any human or animal form—as we will see in the histories of Christine of Stommeln and Ermine of Reims. Zombie tales reveal that they could even animate the bodies of the dead, a belief Richalm shares.49 According to Thomas of Cantimpré, it is mainly the simplices and illiterati who see corporeal demons (Richalm being an exception), while the more spiritual demons prey on intellectuals.50 After reviewing the vast array of demonic manifestations in these thirteenth-century texts, Alexander Murray notes that if any principle sums them up, “it is fluidity.” The demonic world resembles the phantasmagoric landscape of Ovid’s Metamorpho­ ses, which presupposes “a sliding scale between one form of being and another.” Demon exempla, Murray notes, became popular around the same time as personification allegory, and the two genres have one feature in common. Both personify moral abstractions—or, to reverse the perspective, they give abstract form to the uncanny encounters that some experienced as concrete phenomena.51 That said, however, exempla are a form of devout entertainment, while Richalm’s revelations are nothing of the sort. Although his experiences share some points of standard demonology with exempla and hagiography, many aspects are unique and alarming. Hearing demons in daily conversation with one another, Richalm came to believe there was no such thing as an innocent or even a natural sound; all noises were in reality produced by demons. Further, he perceived his own and others’ words and actions as frequently not theirs but demonic impostures. Richalm was punctilious about maintaining a dignified comportment at all times, much like the Victorine educational regime we examined in Chapter  1. For instance, he deplored the behavior of monks who slouched or leaned against their misericords in choir.52 Such laxity delighted the demons. Unable to abide what Mikhail Bakhtin called the “grotesque body,” Richalm explained away all of its less dignified impulses, such as sneezing, yawning, and the like, by ascribing them to demons. The cost, however, was a sacrifice of personhood so extreme that even singing the Divine Office came to seem the work of “spirits” rather than human voices. Richalm’s theory of demonic coinherence ultimately swallowed up all sense of personal moral agency.

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The Liber revelationum devotes little space to interpersonal relationships in the abbey. But as Schmidt keenly observes, Richalm must have held a rather Sartrean view of life in community: l’enfer, c’est les autres!53 He never failed to notice—and deplore—the small, annoying tics of his brother monks, which vexed him so much that he saw their behavior as literally inhuman. But in Brother N. he found at least one loyal friend. This monk tells us almost nothing about himself, but he must have been one of the seniors because he held office during Richalm’s term as prior.54 In fact, Brother N. was probably the chief bulwark between his friend and outright madness. Over a period of many years, while Richalm served as first prior and then abbot, Brother N. took the time to listen patiently to his confidences, drawing him out with questions. (Much of the Liber is composed in dialogue form.) The scribe usually believed what he heard, but he did sometimes challenge his friend. For instance, after Richalm said he heard demons addressing each other corporali voce, Brother N. reminded him that according to Gregory the Great, the words of both God and Satan are spiritual and must be interpreted spiritually.55 And when Richalm claimed that all sounds were the articulate words of demons, it was Brother N. who produced the counterexample of church bells. Thus, in a limited way, he channeled the voice of reason when his friend’s delusions became too extreme. Further, by asking what strategies Richalm used to resist his infernal foes, Brother  N. reminded him that he was not altogether powerless. Even the act of taking down his words on wax tablets, which he later presented for correction, conferred a reassuring importance on Richalm’s sufferings; it gave the struggling abbot a mission. Indeed, Brother N. ends his book on a therapeutic note: “The demons troubled him beyond measure in grasping and hearing the things of God. So as he complained to me very often about this, weeping and sobbing, I used to comfort him by saying that these things the Lord had bestowed on him were so marvelous, unknown, and unheard of.”56 Brother  N. had promised his friend not to “publish” the work in either Richalm’s lifetime or his own. But he violated the second half of that promise and brought the text to light soon after the abbot died, on the ground that his brothers should not be deprived of its “wholesome edification.”57 A short, semihagiographic Vita appended to the oldest manuscript suggests that he even tried to promote a saint cult around his friend. But if so, it gained no traction. There is no evidence that Richalm had been either charismatic or exceptionally virtuous, and no miracles ensued. As for his treatise, it long remained unknown. Caesarius, a fellow Cistercian abbot, could have lifted many an anecdote from Richalm’s revelations, yet he knew nothing of them. Nor is Richalm cited in

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any Franciscan or Dominican exempla collections. The earliest manuscript dates only from the late fourteenth century. But in the fifteenth, with exponentially mounting interest in demons and possession, Richalm suddenly caught on. Six complete manuscripts of his treatise survive, six more contain abridgments and excerpts, and six further lost manuscripts are known.58 In the age that produced the Malleus maleficarum, the abbot’s demon-haunted worldview came to seem more persuasive than ever before.

Folie à deux: Christine of Stommeln and Peter of Dacia In 1267, a few days before Christmas, a student named Peter of Dacia fell in love. Then in his late twenties or early thirties, Peter hailed from the Swedish isle of Gotland and had gone to study at the Dominican studium generale in Cologne. Christine, the object of his affections, was a little younger and lived in Stommeln, a village two miles away. When they met, it was love at first sight—though it was not Christine’s beauty, charm, or even virtue that won Peter’s heart. The young theologian had come to visit the parish priest of Stommeln, who was lodging Christine because of her poverty. He found her in bed in a shabby room, banging her head against a wall so fiercely that it shook the house. Distraught attendants sat around her. When Peter tried to soften the blows with a cushion, the head banging stopped. Instead, Christine cried that her feet hurt—and indeed, they were found to be bleeding from seven fresh wounds. Soon afterward she pulled two long, bloody iron nails from her clothing and gave them to Peter, who would treasure them “for perpetual memory.” Amid the general distress and fear caused by the young woman’s behavior, Peter alone felt “extraordinary joy.” Now at last, God had answered the prayer he had been praying all his life: that he might encounter a saint whose example would shake him out of his spiritual torpor. He could scarcely wait to see more of Christine’s “marvels,” and throughout his life, he never wavered from his first, impetuous belief in her sanctity. During the remaining year he spent in Cologne, he managed to squeeze in ten more visits, becoming a close friend, spiritual director, and rapt observer of her trials. After he moved to Paris for further studies and then returned home to Sweden, he arranged a few additional visits and pursued an avid correspondence. Though Christine could not write, she got her parish priest and a schoolmaster to take dictation and translate her words into Latin, since she and Peter spoke different vernaculars. Supplementing his diary-like accounts of their visits with these letters, Peter produced a strange, fragmentary

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text that has been edited as The Life of Christine of Stommeln.59 On the basis of this manuscript, the Codex Iuliacensis, Christine was beatified in 1908. Yet few lives seem so utterly devoid of bliss.60 What Peter saw in Christine’s room that day was not what a modern observer would have seen. He did not perceive a troubled, masochistic young woman making a theatrical display of self-harm. Instead he saw a sacrificial victim, for it was not Christine herself who pounded her head against the wall or punctured her flesh with nails. No, a demon inflicted those wounds, while she by enduring them displayed saintly patience. To be sure, few others discerned any marks of sainthood in her—neither the beguines with whom she had lived as a teenager, nor her parents, nor Peter’s own socius. Among the beguines, some believed she was insane, epileptic, or a fool.61 They eventually kicked her out, as did her family. Peter himself goes out of his way to show that his response to her was not typical. Those blood-stained nails are a useful touchstone, for Christine never actually said the demons had wounded her feet with them. In fact, pulling them dramatically out of her bedclothes, not long after disclosing her bloody wounds, seems like a clear confession of her self-destructive acts. Yet after a single meeting, Peter cherished the nails as if they were relics of the Passion, even though his instructors at Cologne could have told him that if a demon wanted to harm someone’s body, it would not have to use weapons. For compelling reasons of his own, Peter needed Christine to be a certain kind of saint, a martyr of demonic torments.62 In the rest of this section, I explore the dialectic between that need and her own obsession. Virtually all the scholarship on Christine notes the gulf between her selfpresentation and Peter’s idealized image. As Monika Asztalos puts it, the Vita “produces a curious effect of double vision, in which the image provided by the respectfully enthusiastic and inspired biographer of a severely tried but ultimately triumphant and blessed bride of Christ conflicts with that given by Christina of a tormented . . . woman who suffered serious physical and psychological disorders,” and whose misery “was relieved by the constancy of Peter’s affection to a degree that he never seems to have grasped.”63 The prologue to Christine’s Vita begins not with her but with Peter’s own lifelong prayer to meet a living saint. He longed, as he said, to be united with such a companion in charity, inflamed by her devotion, consoled by her friendship, and freed from all doubt by her example.64 Although his language is gender-neutral, it strongly evokes the model of spiritual friendship between a cleric and a holy woman that had reached its zenith at this time.65 God had already shown Peter many holy men and women who “gladdened [his] heart,” but he admits that they did not

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satisfy his hunger, so he remained “famished” ( famelicum) until he met Christine.66 When he did, her impact was immediate and lifelong, for he knew that his prayer had been answered the moment he witnessed her torments. Indeed, he invokes the solemn tones of the Easter Vigil to describe his joy: “O happy night! O blessed night! You were the beginning for me of divine illuminations that know no difference between night and day. O sweet and delectable night, on which it was first given to me to taste how sweet the Lord is! This is the night on which I first deserved to see the bride of my Lord.”67 Peter had clearly internalized an ideal of feminine sanctity that he now projected onto Christine, whom as yet he barely knew.68 On that model, the saint is Christ’s chosen bride, willing to suffer unlimited physical and spiritual pain for his love, and characterized above all by the supernatural phenomena that surround her—especially visions, raptures, ecstasies, and mysterious wounds. The model is amply displayed in Peter’s account of his second visit in Lent of 1268, about two months after their first meeting. The priest who was housing Christine had invited Peter and his companion to dine with them. After lunch, the virgin obliged the friars with a full performance of her devotions. This included a rigid ecstasy lasting several hours (much to Peter’s delight), followed by joyful endearments between bride and bridegroom, an interval of prayers and thanksgivings that lasted “for the length of a Mass,” a period of bitter weeping over the miseries of this exile, petitionary prayers for friends and enemies, and finally, an ordinary conversation, during which Christine humbly refused to discuss any of her supposedly private devotions. After witnessing her performance, Peter asked how she had fared in his absence—so she regaled him with the first in an infinite series of demon tales. Several weeks before, she said, a large demonic toad had crawled under her dress, attached itself firmly to her breast, dug its claws in, and remained there for a week, until she finally “understood that God wanted to liberate her” so she threw it off. Toads were, among other things, symbols of the female genitalia.69 Peter concludes this sexually charged anecdote by marveling that, a month later, the wounds were still visible on the virgin’s breast. In Peter’s spirituality, Christine plays a complex and central role. She is, above all, proof of the absolute reality of the supernatural.70 Aside from her hair-raising accounts of demonic torments, which she gladly supplies in both oral and written form, Peter sees her body marked by innumerable grisly wounds. He never tires of this sight, nor does it occur to him that they might have natural causes. After seeing her face covered with livid bruises that recall Christ’s scourging, along with round “stigmata” in her hands, Peter says he

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never tasted a dish more delicious.71 On his seventh visit, he finds Christine neck-deep in a latrine full of filth, thrown there by the devil. She is unconscious, but when she revives and learns that two friars have hauled her to safety, her only regret is that her body has been touched by men—leading Peter to rhapsodize about her modesty.72 On several occasions, he claims to have personally experienced a demon hurling excrement at her. Even when she blasphemes in this filthy state, apparently possessed, Peter responds with devotion and thanksgiving. The satanic origin of such marvels troubles him not at all, for he takes it as axiomatic that the Enemy would not be persecuting Christine unless she were Christ’s beloved bride. Thus each new torture only confirms her status as a bridal mystic—despite the fact that all accounts of her union with the divine Beloved derive from his own pen. Such material is all but absent from her letters—a strong indication that Peter fleshes out his fantasy of Christine with the joys he assumes she simply must experience but is too modest to express.73 In addition to embodying Peter’s ideal of sainthood, Christine met his need for a beloved. The depth of his affection is plain from his letters, written in a florid, old-fashioned vein of epistolary friendship seldom found among schoolmen.74 Addressing an illiterate peasant who lived on the charity of a priest while she fought her demons, Peter honed his elegant Latin with greetings like this: “To the beloved friend of his heart, his special companion and spiritual sister Christine, dearest to him in Christ, the inspiration of his charity, the pioneer and exemplar of friendship; or if it sounds more pleasing, to his own heart and half his soul: Friar Peter, not unfamiliar in name and affection, wishes with the fervor of the Holy Spirit that she might forever feel, embrace, and imitate the things of the Spirit.”75 And so forth, for six densely written pages. Christine replied through a fellow Dominican by lamenting her poverty and begging for funds to repair the family home, which was on the verge of collapse. (The next letter, from a different friar, reports that it had indeed collapsed during a fire, but “miraculously” no one was hurt.) After her plea for money, Christine tells Peter that a demon has just cruelly extracted two of her molars with forceps.76 This exchange is absolutely typical of their correspondence. Both express mutual love and need, but all the lofty spiritual rhetoric is on his side, all the material and psychic desperation on hers. Christine’s own voice, mediated as it is, emerges most clearly in an autobiographical “notebook” she dictated to John, the curate of Stommeln, and gave Peter when he visited her in 1270, on his way back to Sweden after his studies in Paris.77 She was about twenty-seven at the time. Christine reports that she left home at the age of thirteen to join the beguines of Cologne. Since her parents had

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not given their permission, they cut off all financial support, leaving her in poverty and hunger. Nor did the beguines welcome such a young, unstable recruit. Adopting a fanatically ascetic regimen against their advice, Christine soon began to experience demonic harassment. Suicide was her first and chronic temptation, along with disbelief in the sacrament, acedia, and starvation fasting. Hallucinations followed. All food appeared to her as “toads, serpents, or spiders,” and if she tried to eat as a priest had commanded, she would vomit at once. When she wished to drink water from a jug, a voice within it spoke to her: “If you drink me, you will drink the devil.”78 Demons vexed her in an array of animal forms, beat her bloody, drove her half deaf with their bellowing, and kept her from Communion by creating an illusion of fire around the priest and the whole church. Eventually, after many more trials, the spirits changed tactics by tempting Christine to live a normal secular life. They promised to make her rich, saying she could find happiness if only she would consent to marry and have children. Demonic actors, playing the roles of an amorous couple with a baby, illustrated these seductive promises. Although Christine rejected them, her narrative ends with a remarkably detailed fantasy about a demon lover. In this scenario, which displays the full force of her imagination, she falls in love with “the worst kind of criminal” at the devil’s instigation. Assuming his form, a demon visits her every night, promising to make her a fine lady if she accepts his embraces. When she resists, he complains that he will die of lovesickness, then threatens to rape and kill her, and finally says he will kill her parents instead. As the fantasy escalates, Christine’s father pleads with her to yield and spare his life, but she plays the stern virgin martyr and exhorts him: “Go now, hasten gladly to your death!” Finally, after murdering the father, the demon tries to carry out his threat of sexual violence. But Christine snatches his knife and wounds herself savagely to preclude any pleasure she might feel during the rape. At this crowning moment, the demon departs, but her self-inflicted wound bleeds steadily for three days and three nights. Finally Christ appears, and Christine offers him a cloth dripping with her blood. Her gift produces the desired response: “I see that you have chosen no other bridegroom but me.”79 Christine’s sexual fantasy reveals a spiritually ambitious young woman in her prime, her body goaded to rebellion by holy anorexia and other tortures, her vivid imagination fired by saints’ Lives. Her fantasy of erotic love, both feared and longed for, takes ever more violent forms. First she dreams of fulfillment in ordinary marriage and motherhood, then imagines a torrid affair with a “bad boy,” who finally morphs into a demon. Stepping up his game, the evil spirit proceeds from a courtly love scenario to threats of murder to a more ethically

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challenging threat to kill others—but inevitably, the plot culminates in attempted rape. Just as St.  Augustine and other male theorists had predicted, Christine expects to feel pleasure even when violated against her will—although the tenor of her fantasy suggests that, on one level, she very much desires this rape.80 Tellingly, though, her only actual wound is one she herself inflicts. Only when she has practically bled to death does Christ show himself, healing the wound and promising her the same reward as St.  Catherine. But then he departs—leaving her with no sacred betrothal, no invisible wedding ring, no divine love talk. Instead, the text hastens back to demons. For three nights running, Christine dreams about the tortures of hell—“all the wailing and tears and striking hammers, the pain of heat and cold, toads and serpents, stench and smoke, and other torments” that she deserves for her sins. Seeing that intolerable pains await her in hell and purgatory “on account of a small thing” (propter mod­ icum quid), she begs to be tortured in advance by a monster she saw in her vision. One wonders if the “small thing” had to do with any pleasure she had taken in her fantasies. At any rate, the pestiferous beast returns, tortures Christine for a week, and vomits a quart of poison onto her before the Virgin arrives and heals her with a honeyed chalice. On that note her narrative ends. Christine’s letters to Peter are, if possible, even more obsessed with demons. Gratifying his insatiable appetite, she reports that her torturers assault her with hot iron, inflict blisters in her mouth, cause fevers and convulsions, hurl lances and knives at her, make her sweat blood, tempt her to blaspheme, bite like dogs, appear in the elevated host, dislocate her arm, burn her back, hang her from trees, sever parts of her body, and emit a sulfurous stench. Her most gruesome tortures, she claims, have multiple witnesses. One day a demon appears with the head of a corpse in its hand, swings it back and forth to frighten people, then hurls it at the priest’s sister. Its wide-open eyes, like the Green Knight’s, fix Christine with a horrifying gaze.81 Another time the devil thrusts a skinned cat into her mouth, where the next day her companions witness its bloody head protruding.82 Whatever physical and mental illnesses Christine may have suffered, and whether she experienced these torments as actuality, fantasy, or pure literary invention, her letters manage to be at once salacious and numbingly monotonous. Between them, Peter and Christine had invented the fertile genre of demon porn. Although the Vita Christinae had no influence and survives in a single manuscript, it was a harbinger of things to come, as we will see in the similar but independent case of Ermine of Reims. At a few points, Christine’s experience challenges the boundary between obsession and possession. On his tenth visit, Peter and his companions witness

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a dialogue between the devil and Christine, both speaking by turns through her mouth: That demon—the ancient Enemy, proud and bold, who wished to be like God in heaven—hurled himself to earth with such great audacity, pride, and blasphemy that he crept stealthily into Christine’s bed and powerfully shook the whole bed. There he loudly and arrogantly blasphemed, proclaiming these words with melody and rhyme as if in a rhythmic chant: “Where now is your God, where is your God?” After repeating these words many times, he answered his own question. That most filthy, wicked spirit dared to ascribe the name of deity to himself, arrogantly claiming to be the God of infinite majesty and goodness. . . . Guilty of every evil, that wretch declared, “I am your God, I am your God! . . . for I have power to do with you whatever I please.” . . . During all this, Christine lay in the bed that the demon was shaking. After these and many more horrible words, she spoke in the hearing of all who were sitting around her. Shaken, I believe, by the blasphemy against God’s name, she said, “I adjure you, demon, by the power of the Passion of our Lord Jesus Christ, that you explain the truth of these words you have spoken.” At this the wretch changed his tone and left off singing and rhyming. . . . From then on he spoke only in a hoarse, trembling voice, like a decrepit old man, and began to tell the simple truth and confess that he had lied. “Truly I lied in everything I said, for I am not God. Not only do I not share his nature, but I have justly and irrevocably lost my share in his bliss. Yet I received authority from him to pursue my malice against you, and I have zealously done this. . . . Now my companions will despise me as a coward, for I have not prevailed against a single girl.”83 This remarkable performance required Christine to adopt three different voices: first the proud, blasphemous demon singing a rhythmic chant and claiming to be God; then her own voice with the authority of an exorcist, extorting truth from the demon; and finally a second demonic voice, now humbled and confessing defeat. The rapt audience consisted of the parish priest, his sister, a serving woman, and several friars. Peter never states that the demon spoke through her own mouth, which would have meant that Christine was possessed. Yet that is the obvious implication, since it is hardly possible that all these witnesses heard a disembodied voice. Was Christine in fact possessed—

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or was she just putting on a very effective show? The truth may lie somewhere in between. All of Peter’s reports betray Christine’s exhibitionist tendencies, and the larger her audience, the more impressive her performances. Yet the depth of her physical and spiritual suffering makes it seem unlikely that she was engaged in purely deliberate fraud. At any rate, Christine threw herself vigorously into this drama, alternately playing her own role and that of the demon as she exultantly blasphemed, rebuked the spirit of blasphemy, and finally enacted its comeuppance. As in her sexual fantasies, she was able to have it both ways, performing a forbidden act (in the person of a demon) even as she emphatically rejected it in her own person. In this respect, Christine’s obsession contrasts starkly with that of Richalm of Schöntal. While the unhappy abbot did his best to conceal his preoccupation with demons, confessing it only to Brother N., Christine flaunted her experiences and reveled in the attention they brought. The role Peter played went beyond that of an admiring spectator, for he was the chief patron and promoter of these diabolophanies. There is something of the impresario about him, a strange mix of credulity and showmanship. Like Charcot’s grand theater of hysteria in the Salpêtrière, Christine’s bedchamber becomes a venue for spectacular displays of the uncanny. The more implausible the phenomena, the more Peter relishes them. For Christine’s pièce de résistance, the infamous demonic shitstorm, he sets the stage carefully. Four priests attend the patient, one sitting on each side of her bed, near enough to touch her if need be, with two women also present. When all the witnesses are in place, the show begins. “As far as I could tell,” Peter records, the demon defiled Christine more than twenty times in a variety of ways. Those who were present at the time used to call this torment “defilement” (defedacionem) because it was inflicted by the most disgusting matter, that is, human excrement. Sometimes the demon pelted her whole body with this material beneath her tunic, and sometimes only her face; sometimes he smeared it on her head beneath her veil, like a kind of paste. And this seemed even more marvelous: he spread a thick layer of filth between her eyelids and her pupils. Sometimes, too, he filled her mouth with the same filth, and sometimes he pressed it between her teeth so firmly and forcefully that it could scarcely be removed or wiped away with a cloth. I would be lying if I did not [say that I] removed this filth, administered by such means, from the aforesaid places with my own hands.84

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The account continues at sickening length. Questioned by Peter, Christine admits that the demon is constantly before her eyes, though invisible to the others. After a third night of horror, two priests attempt an exorcism, only to be spattered with liquid excrement themselves. Inexplicably, this fills one of them with joy and laughter. Christine herself asserts (without washing) that even amid the demon’s filth, she can smell “a fragrance sweeter than all spices.”85 Aviad Kleinberg treats this episode as a case study in hagiographic method, rightly noting that most medieval readers would have found the tale every bit as incredible and repugnant as we do. In this case, we cannot exonerate Peter from the charge of fabrication on the ground that he took his subject’s fantasies too literally, for he claims to have been an eyewitness and participant in these events. So “Peter must be lying,” Kleinberg states baldly. “But why this particular lie, why not other, more impressing, more beautiful lies?”86 Perhaps, he suggests, Peter only heard the story as related by Christine but, being convinced of its truth, decided to make it more vivid by giving it “eyewitness authority.” If so, he badly misjudged his readers. John Coakley includes Peter and Christine in his fine study of hagiographic couples—holy women paired with the clerics who supported them in life and memorialized them in death. The two did see themselves as partners in a spiritual marriage.87 Perhaps more urgently than any of Coakley’s other male subjects, Peter needed Christine to give him a sense of divine presence, even if he had to imagine it because what she really experienced was demonic presence.88 As for Christine, she needed Peter just as much, not only as her spiritual beloved, but also as her patron. Given her peculiarities, she had few friends, and his support and adulation became the mainstay of her difficult life. At least once he sent her a large sum of money, and he pulled strings to get her illiterate brother admitted to the Dominican order.89 Since theirs was a long-distance relationship, conducted mainly by correspondence, it is possible that after a while Christine knowingly began to expand on her demonic repertoire, concocting ever more bizarre and fantastic tales to give Peter the kind of letters he demanded. Kleinberg catches her in the act, regaling him with a story of how, by her prayers, she had converted seven murderous bandits in a forest three hundred miles away before they were put to death. Salimbene di Adam attributes that tale to Berthold von Regensburg, who had recently preached in the vicinity of Cologne. So on at least one occasion Christine committed “spiritual plagiarism.” At other times, too, she may have fed Peter’s boundless appetite with invention after she had exhausted her experience.90

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This possibility is supported by a key piece of evidence, at odds with all Peter’s writings. A brief anonymous Vita, published in the Acta Sanctorum, is wholly dependent on the Codex Iuliacensis except for its ending, which suggests that it was an abridgment made for a canonization bid.91 In his penultimate paragraph, this writer mentions the calamitous battle of Worringen (5 June 1288), at which Christine’s prayers are said to have saved the life of a winning combatant and kept several on the losing side out of hell. About a year and a half after the battle, he states, “all persecution from the devil ceased completely. At that time, by the grace of the Bridegroom, the bride divinely vanquished Lucifer and all demons both in hell and outside of it, fighting bravely and conquering manfully. So she triumphed gloriously over them all—the flesh, the world, and the devil.” More remarkably still, on 6 November 1313, “the bride of Christ Christine migrated from the Church Militant at the age of 70 and happily attained the Church Triumphant.”92 In other words, the last twentyfour years of her life were completely uneventful, and the writer has nothing to report about them. He adds that “her sacred body” rests in the church of Niedeggen near Jülich and “has not yet been elevated,” nor has she been canonized, “although the Lord Pope has been petitioned to do this.” If Christine was born in 1243 and her notebook accurately records her memories, her demon trouble began at the age of fifteen and ended, according to the abridged Vita, when she was forty-six. Since the first age corresponds roughly with menarche and the second with menopause, it is possible that she suffered from a hormone-linked mental illness, improving dramatically as soon as her menstrual cycles ended.93 Or perhaps her mental health had stabilized much earlier, but she continued to produce demon tales for Peter as long as he lived. Not by coincidence, he died in Lent of 1289, and Christine was informed in a letter dated 9 September of that year.94 In other words, she learned of Peter’s death about a year and a half after the battle of Worringen. Then, deprived of her audience, she stopped performing. Unfortunately, we know nothing about the last phase of her life except that she continued to live with a small group of beguines. But if the anonymous writer lived in the region and personally knew Christine, or at least her acquaintances, we can accept his word that soon after Peter’s death, her sufferings ceased. At the beginning of this chapter, I asked what becomes of the human person—of agency and subjectivity—when demonic obsession strikes. In the case of Christine of Stommeln, it is all but impossible to say. Her letters and her notebook, despite the mediation of Latinate scribes, reveal no hint of the saintly

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subjectivity that Peter fantasized for her. Christine’s voice is not that of a mystic, enjoying or yearning for the delights of the celestial Bridegroom. Christ rarely speaks to Christine, nor does she have divine visions. Instead, it’s “demons all the way down.” Yet some signs of human personhood peek through. Most notably, Christine was an exhibitionist, almost a performance artist, enjoying the attentions of her audience—whether those who physically witnessed her strug gles or Peter as her solitary reader.95 She had a potent imagination centered on her role as a demonic martyr, and when her repertoire of torments ran dry, she was quite capable of inventing new ones. Yet she was also canny enough to advocate for her own needs with the one person who valued her enough to help. Above all, Christine fashioned herself consistently into the person Peter needed her to be. If she supplied the demons, he could supply all the rest—with the result that she won a modest local saint cult and, six hundred years later, an implausible niche among the blessed. But for the twenty-four years of her maturity—the years when, without Peter or the demons, she was truly “her own person”—the silence of history is absolute.

Enabling Demons: Jean Le Graveur and Ermine of Reims “Various patients,” observes the psychologist Stanley Rachman, “have described their obsessional thoughts, impulses, or images as: immoral, sinful, disgusting, revealing, dangerous, threatening, alarming. . . . At a higher level, they interpreted these thoughts, impulses, or images as revealing important but usually hidden elements in their character, such as: these obsessions mean that deep down I am an evil person.”96 Rachman’s remarks about contemporary OCD patients apply just as well to the demon-haunted French peasant Ermine of Reims. Ermine is not the sort of character who usually appears in medieval texts, least of all the mystical type. If not for the diabolophanies that made the last year of her life a nightmare, she would have remained as obscure as any other peasant. We owe our sole account of her life to the man who unwittingly destroyed her. Jean Le Graveur, Ermine’s confessor, was subprior of the Augustinian canons at Val-des-Écoliers in Reims. As I will argue, his spiritual direction of the widowed Ermine was his bid to fashion a saint for whom he cherished high ambitions. After her death in 1396, he and his friend Jean Morel sent his vernacular account of her “visions” (the title is editorial) to the University of Paris, where the text was examined for nine months by the chancellor Jean Gerson and the faculties of theology, law, and medicine.97 If Gerson had approved, the canons

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would have disseminated Jean Le Graveur’s text as widely as possible to warn laymen and women against the devil’s wiles.98 Instead, the chancellor replied with his usual caution, vetoing lay distribution but remarking that a Latin translation might be helpful for clerics. One was duly produced and survives in three known manuscripts, which made their way as far as Brabant and Freiburg im Breisgau.99 Ermine had the misfortune to be born around 1347, a year before the Black Death (of which she ultimately died). In her native village of Lucheux near Reims, she married a husband twenty-six years her senior. Depopulation due to plague may have been a factor in the unequal marriage; Regnault could well have been a widower. We do not know if the couple had any surviving children, but it seems unlikely, as no children are mentioned among the many persons who visit Ermine or appear in her visions. For a peasant couple, Regnault and Ermine were reasonably well off until he became too old to farm. Like most rural wives, she had probably worked the fields at his side. But in 1384, when Regnault was sixty-three and Ermine only thirty-seven, they left the countryside and settled in Reims, where they were able to afford a modest house. Since Regnault was now too disabled to work, Ermine supported them both by gathering reeds to sell for thatch. It was a marginal living, but they got by. The couple attended the nearby priory church of Saint-Paul du Val-des-Écoliers and took Jean Le Graveur as their confessor. After nine years of urban life, Regnault died in 1393. His widow was forty-six, hardly ancient. Ermine must have found a way to notify her extended family, for Jean records that her “friends” (amis) came to Reims several times to bring her home to their village. These were almost certainly relatives, for they offered to support Ermine and care for her as long as she lived.100 At this juncture, she took the fateful step of asking her confessor for advice, and he “told her not to go back to the country; she had begun to serve God and should persevere all her life and trust in God, for he would never fail her.”101 The relatives did not give up easily, but Ermine steadfastly refused to go home with them—although, as her visions reveal, she longed to do so. Instead, Jean gave her a room in an almshouse for indigent women next door to the priory. From her window she could see the courtyard of the church and hear all the ser vices. Jean “commanded” her to rise every night for Matins, around midnight, and listen through the window. She promised to “do it gladly,” he reports, “and not only that but whatever I wished to command her for her salvation, for she wanted to obey my commandment in everything for the love of God . . . she asked my permission as a monk does of his superior.”102 Ermine regarded this agreement as an irrevocable vow; her salvation hinged on her obedience.

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Upon moving into her chamber, she undertook a severe penitential regime. On Fridays she fasted on bread and water, with additional fasts on Wednesdays, Saturdays, and Marian vigils. Not only did she rise for Matins, she spent “more than a hundred nights without sleeping until dawn”—sometimes, Jean claims, because she prayed all night.103 She slept on a narrow bed of straw and wore a hair shirt with two knotted belts, letting her skin grow over these instruments of torture until she was unable to take them off. When Jean “commanded” her to remove them anyway, she tied one end of the rope to a nail and moved away quickly, so that the belts came loose as her abdomen was flayed in the process. Her mantra, which Jean says she often repeated, was je ne puis avoir trop de maulx: “I can never suffer enough.”104 She adopted such extreme penances because she found it hard to believe that her sins could ever be forgiven. “I hate my whole body for the sins it has committed against God,” she is supposed to have said, “so if I could do it without sin, I would gladly pierce my heart with a knife.”105 Feeling unworthy to live, she wept abundantly. If anyone asked for her prayers she felt ashamed, for she considered herself “one of the worst women in the world.”106 Jean clearly adapted hagiographic models to present Ermine as a penitential saint, an exemplar of humility and discernment, and a martyr of demonic torments, much like Christine of Stommeln. (Although he could not have heard of her, he certainly knew about St. Anthony, the ultimate model.) Though the widow was only une povre femme, simple et ygnorant, she was nevertheless un droit mirouer, a mirror of obedience for simple men and women like herself.107 If Jean had succeeded in publicizing her, he would have gained vicarious glory, and his ambitions for his text show it to have been in some measure a career move. Hence Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski asks, “Did Jean le Graveur sacrifice Ermine’s mental and material well-being to his own goals of producing a saint for the glory of his order? Perhaps.”108 Nevertheless, she reads Jean’s role more sympathetically than I do. I do not believe that he knowingly sacrificed Ermine’s well-being; he undoubtedly thought he was acting for the good of her soul. Still, even if we take his account of her penitential practices with a grain of salt, it is not hard to see why she lost her mind. Having been a working woman all her life, Ermine was only middle-aged when her husband died. Unlike Christine and other, better-known holy women, she had not chosen the religious life, so enforced solitude and idleness were new to her. As she was illiterate, the Matins she gave up her sleep to hear were sung in a language she did not understand by a brotherhood she could not hope to join. She owned no book of hours and could not recite the Psalter. When Jean tested her on the basic prayers that every Christian was supposed to know (in Latin), he

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found that she was mispronouncing the Our Father and skipping several articles of the Creed.109 Her devotions consisted of praying Hail Marys on her rosary beads, hearing Mass, listening to the canons chant, and gazing on a panel painting of the arma Christi, which she used as a shield against demons. After their visitations began (Jean calls them merveilleuses aventures, a phrase straight out of romance), he asked her to confess daily and receive Communion every week. But what kind of sins could such a woman have to confess? Ermine’s life had been a hard one, affording few occasions for self-indulgence. She had probably borne and lost children, and she had certainly lost friends and relatives to the plague, which recurred at frequent intervals after its onslaught in 1348. Even if she had genuinely loved her husband, their age difference makes it unlikely that they reveled in youthful lust. As a peasant farmer, Ermine would have had little opportunity for sins of avarice, gluttony, or sloth. Once when a voice warned her that she had not fully confessed her sins, she asked which ones she had left out. All the spirit could think of was that she had once spoken rudely to a sick woman—and that, she said, she had already confessed!110 So, unless her extravagant claim to be “one of the worst women in the world” was Jean’s hagiographic invention, her shocking sinfulness may have been no more than code for the fact that she had slept with her husband. In the puritanical culture of the late medieval church, even marital sex established a vast gulf between virgins and everyone else. Margery Kempe, Ermine’s contemporary, could scarcely forgive herself for her lost virginity, no matter how much Christ assured her of his love.111 Typically for the age, Jean Le Graveur preached that women could be damned for their fashion choices or for dancing,112 so he presumably came down just as hard on anything else connected with sexuality. But even if Ermine had begun her penitential regime with a life confession, her solitude at the almshouse would have given her little to say in a daily confession unless the demons supplied material. For Jean’s overriding question amounted to a simple, prurient curiosity: Who came to visit you in your bedroom last night, and what did they do there? When Regnault died, Ermine had several options. Since she had been the breadwinner, she could have continued her previous work, supplementing her income with alms. She could have gone back to her village to live with the “friends” who did their best to persuade her. Or as one of her apparitions intriguingly suggests, she could have become a professional pilgrim, making the rounds of local pardons (religious festivals) to collect indulgences for paying clients.113 Instead, she took Jean’s doubtless well-meant advice. But once she had solemnly sworn monk-like obedience, she found herself in a bind, for now any

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change of course would endanger her salvation—or so she believed. As we have seen in the case of Dorothea of Montau, an ambitious confessor who wanted the prestige of directing his own holy woman could exercise all the prerogatives of an abusive husband: isolating her from family and friends, demanding rigorous obedience, exercising heavy-handed authority, and arrogating to himself the sole right to probe her inner life, judge her thoughts, and mediate them as he saw fit. This is precisely how Jean Le Graveur behaved. In effect, by discussing her apparitions with his brethren, he was violating the seal of confession, though he secured her “permission” with the plea that he was himself a simple man and needed the advice of others. But he admits that if she had known he was writing down everything she said, she would have been furious. One of her greatest fears was that her demonic visitations would become widely known, leading to ridicule.114 Ermine survived her harsh regimen for about two years before her sanity began to crack, for Regnault had died sometime in 1393 and her demonic adventures began on All Saints’ Day, 1395. For a full year before that date, she often heard a voice calling to her at night, sounding exactly like Jean Le Graveur. Jean told her this was “the Enemy,” and she should not respond.115 Tellingly, then, her breakdown began when she first mentally conflated her confessor with Satan—an ominous portent. After a year of this nocturnal voice, her aventures began in earnest on 1 November  1395 and continued for almost ten months until her death on 25 August 1396. Ermine’s nightly apparitions seem to be of infinite variety, but there are three basic types. Often the demons (sathenas) appear in hideous forms, with horns and fiery tongues “as they are depicted in plays,” or as monstrous, threatening beasts.116 The poor woman is “haunted,” in Blumenfeld-Kosinski’s words, “by a veritable demonic and unruly zoo.”117 These apparitions torture Ermine physically, verbally, and psychologically. Their visits often result in self-harm and suicide attempts, though she seems unaware that she herself is inflicting these injuries. Second, a voice whispers or shouts in her ear, by turns tempting, threatening, and consoling. Third and most interesting, she encounters many “good” apparitions—visitors in the guise of her confessor, her late husband, friends from her home town, angels, and innumerable saints. Jean Le Graveur considers Ermine to be a marvel of discernment for seeing through the Enemy’s masks and addressing almost all these visitors as “stinking demons.” Even Gerson praises her humility and “prudent simplicity.”118 Like the protagonist of a personification allegory, Ermine objectifies all her thoughts, feelings, and impulses. They take visible form as interlocutors with whom she can argue—and when we attend to their voices, we see that although

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she was uneducated, she wasn’t stupid. That distinction was lost on Jean Le Graveur, who vouched for Ermine’s truthfulness by claiming that she was too “simple” to make anything up.119 He called her a femmelette, a patronizing diminutive equivalent to the Latin muliercula, used dismissively by writers on the discernment of spirits. But if we read closely, there is no mystery about her discernment. Her first principle is that, being a povre pecheresse, she is “not worthy to see anything good.” Since she believes herself unworthy of mercy, she can receive none—and sure enough, as soon as she insults her saintly visitors, they give way to sathenas. In short, she sees demons because she feels she deserves to see them. The second touchstone is Jean Le Graveur himself. Any voice that suggests even a mild critique of the confessor is ipso facto demonic; only those who praise him and reinforce Ermine’s obedience can pass muster as authentic saints. In other words, Jean places himself at the moral center of his text. But it served his interest to recognize at least some of his protégée’s sacred visions as authentic because, like Peter of Dacia, he could not represent her as a saint unless God had consoled her at times with genuine mystical graces. If we read Jean’s horrifying text against the grain, we can discern two valuable counter-narratives. One is the poignant history of Ermine’s mental breakdown. A vulnerable woman does her best to resist constant assaults on her health and sanity, yet—sleep-deprived, half-starved, and lacking all recreation—she succumbs. The second, more intriguing subtext is a critique of the religious system that trapped her, for on some level, Ermine knew exactly what she needed. Her “saints” gave her precisely the spiritual consolations that could have saved her, had she been willing to accept them, yet her loyalty to Jean Le Graveur compelled her to reject such voices as demonic. By listening to what these saints, angels, and friendly counsellors actually say, even if Ermine calls them demons, we can piece together a cogent protest against the constraints of rigid obedience, penitential asceticism, and the emotional regime of guilt and fear that underlies them. Ironically, this critique accords at several points with the views of leading writers on discernment, men such as Gerson and Henry of Langenstein. The foundation of Ermine’s religious practice is ineluctable guilt; her selfloathing goes well beyond formulaic expressions of humility. If the demons want to kill her, let them, she says, for “I have truly deserved it.”120 Or again, “I am not worthy to live because of my sins.”121 Cursing her body as she flagellates herself, she exclaims, “You dirty, stinking carrion, no demon in hell is more hostile and opposed to your salvation than you are yourself!”122 Time and again she repeats her refrain, “I am a poor sinful woman, unworthy that anything good should come to me.”123 She says as much even to the Virgin Mary. Saints John

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the Baptist, Mary Magdalene, Peter, Augustine, Léger, Remi, Catherine, and Agnes, as well as a bevy of angels, must in fact be demons because God would never send real saints to a sinner like her. Of course other holy women had routinely conversed with saints, but they were virgins who lived in less skeptical times. In her fine study on the discernment of spirits, Wendy Love Anderson compares two nearly identical visions of the Virgin, one experienced by Christina of Markyate around 1115, the other by Veronica Binasco around 1467. In each case Mary helps a devout woman surmount obstacles to entering religious life. While Christina welcomes her intervention with joy, Veronica tells her, “I think that you are the devil, who has put on the appearance of [the Mother of God] in order to deceive me.”124 Obviously, the wary climate fostered by discretio spirituum affected Ermine as well. As a peasant woman with a sexually active past, she already had three strikes against her. Whatever others might think, she herself simply did not believe she could merit divine consolations. When Ermine does see an authentic saint, he repeatedly tells her that she can be damned more easily than another because of the courtoisies God has shown her.125 Ermine was not merely guilt-ridden and fearful of damnation. Throughout the ten months of her ordeal, she was actively suicidal, though she seems not to have been aware of it. What she consciously experienced was nightly torment, injury, and threats to her life at the hands of demons. Although neither she herself nor Jean Le Graveur acknowledged her injuries as self-inflicted, the evidence is clear. Early in her adventures, a faux St.  Andrew urges Ermine to moderate her penitential regime: “Take off this hair shirt and take a little recreation, and do not be suicidal” (ne soyes mie omicide de toy mesmes).126 She of course rejects that advice. On 1 December, she tries for the first time to escape her torturers by jumping out her window, which she finds blocked by a demon. But on two later occasions, she has ceased to be aware of her own agency, for she thinks demons are attempting to throw her out the window.127 In February and May, they threaten to hang, strangle, or crucify her, dropping her from the ceiling to the floor and leaving serious bruises.128 These events suggest that, while in the grip of delusions, Ermine had tried to hang herself without recognizing the act as her own. On 7 March the demons bring a knife—an object she probably kept in her room to cut bread. She feels the point at her throat, “very sharp,” as her enemies taunt her with the threat, “You will die now.”129 Three weeks before her actual death, a friend sees that her hand is badly burned, an injury she ascribes to a demon who had snatched it with his own fiery hand.130 Incidents of self-harm recur from the beginning to the end of Ermine’s aventures. Jean Le Graveur is so far from suspecting her that he cites her injuries

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as evidence of the demons’ reality.131 On one particularly bad night, three demons first trample on her chest, then bind her hands to her feet like a lamb being driven to market and drag her around the room. Jean remarks that many saw the large bruise on her chest and the marks left by demonic cords on her limbs.132 Neighbors in adjacent rooms could hear the sounds of her strug gle— “like cats fighting,” one woman said.133 These testimonies persuade us that Ermine’s injuries were real enough. But even if Jean was totally credulous, others had their doubts. On 8 February, we find Ermine testifying before the whole priory at a chapter meeting: “My dear brothers and friends, you know my very hard and marvelous adventures. The demons threaten me wonderfully, and I only know that God suffers them to do this because of my sins. So if you find me drowned or strangled or dead by any other death, you should know for certain that they will have done it. For I will never do myself any harm ( je ne me feray nul mal)—I swear to you.”134 Ermine may have been telling the truth as she saw it, but her plea sounds very much as if some skeptical brothers had realized what was happening and warned her against self-harm. Like Richalm of Schöntal, her constant interaction with demons had all but destroyed her sense of agency, though her delusions cut much deeper than his. Two months later, in a bizarre incident, Ermine reports that some coalblack demons carried her out her window and set her down on the roof of the church. There she supported herself by clinging to a stone cross until more demons, disguised as angels, offered to carry her safely back to bed. If she failed to trust them, she would surely fall—“and then you will be damned because you will be the cause of your own death” (si seras dempnee car tu seras cause de ta mort).135 Realizing how unlikely this aventure seems, Jean tries to prove it by noting that Ermine’s kerchief and rosary were found in the garden the next day. Whatever really happened, she must have been severely delusional, for after this incident she fell into temporary amnesia and aphasia, unable to recognize people. “When she regained her speech she sang loudly, sometimes laughed very loud, sometimes wept, and was ill for several days from the fear she had experienced.”136 In short, she suffered a psychotic episode—the only time her nightly torments spilled over into an attack lasting for days on end. But in the midst of this torment, Ermine was aware that her behavior appeared to be suicidal and could thus cause her damnation. It might have been this ever-present fear that kept her from ever completing the act. In these painful events we can trace a continuum from passively to actively suicidal behavior. Her ferocious asceticism put her sanity at risk, and on some level Ermine knew it. Several saints (whom she rejects as demons) warn her

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about this, urging her to moderate her penance and trust more in God’s mercy. A faux John the Baptist tells her, “I have looked at all your works, and it seems to me that you have committed only a few sins. You must not have such great fear about your salvation as you do, for you do many penances.”137 St.  Peter shows Ermine the keys of paradise and promises to admit her, adding, “Have no fear about your salvation.”138 Another consoling voice says, “There’s no need to do so much penance, for you could fall into a grave sickness, and you’re a poor woman.” But this demon betrays itself by veering into heresy: “I want you to know as certain truth that ever since God suffered his passion, no baptized person has ever been damned. But they don’t say this publicly because no one would want to do anything good. Don’t you tell anyone either—but believe it firmly.”139 (It was partly to comfort overscrupulous devotees like Ermine that her contemporary, Julian of Norwich, urged readers to place their trust in a loving, gracious God. To that end, Julian too skated close to universalism.) Another seeming angel warns that unless Ermine willingly leaves the subprior and her cell, she will soon do so unwillingly—“out of your mind, completely crazy.”140 Her process of slow, quasi-passive self-destruction accelerates when she flays herself to remove her rope belts or strips naked and beats herself bloody with a homemade scourge.141 Although Ermine spits on the cautionary angel and calls it a demon, its counsel is not far from Gerson’s. In the first of his treatises on discernment, which he wrote around the time Jean Morel consulted him about Ermine, the chancellor mentioned a woman who went mad from excessive fasts. Advising the golden mean, he warned that indiscreet fasting could cause incurable diseases, including irreversible brain damage (morbos affert incurabiles ex laesione cerebri). It leads to hallucinations such that people mistake their fantasies for real objects and see, hear, and touch things that aren’t actually there. Some have become so deluded as to think they are cats or chickens. Gerson cites Jerome to the effect that some supposed visionaries need medical help more than spiritual counsel. He himself, he asserts, has examined many persons with mental illness who normally appeared quite sane but under special circumstances became delusional.142 Ermine’s case throws the wisdom of such common sense into relief; she would have been better off with the skeptical Gerson as her director than the “supportive” Jean Le Graveur. By the end of his career, Gerson had earned his reputation for misogyny, but it does not yet surface in the first treatise, On the Distinction of True and False Revelations (1401). At the end of his last treatise on this theme, On the Examination of Doctrines (1423), he mentions that he had once been “nearly seduced about a certain Ermine of Reims” because he had

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believed the accounts of “certain men of great reputation” (Jean Le Graveur and Jean Morel).143 Ermine herself had never made any claims to sanctity or prophecy; she wished only to keep her ordeal as secret as possible. Gerson does not explain how he would later have assessed her visions, but he would presumably have thought of them as delusions rather than supernatural beings. Aside from her mortifications, Ermine was vulnerable in many other ways. As a grieving widow in her late forties, she was highly susceptible to sexual temptations. In this milieu, of course, even the least sexual thought counted as a “temptation” or worse. Early in her ordeal, an attractive demonic couple show up one night in her bedroom, where they kiss, embrace, and make love ( firent en­ semble pechié). After they finish, the man tells Ermine that she is a fool to kill herself with fasting and vigils: “It would be better for you to take your ease and fulfill the desires of your body, for you cannot avoid damnation.”144 So why suffer two hells—here and hereafter? A week later, a man who looks just like her husband hops into bed with her, though she rejects him as a demon.145 Another sexual incident suggests that by April Ermine had begun to hallucinate even outdoors, or else to mistake living people for demons. In the courtyard she meets a squire from her home country, gorgeously dressed in a beaver hat, a blue and red particolored houpellande, a silver-studded collar, and pointed shoes. (Ermine took a lively interest in fashion, perhaps an exciting discovery for her when she moved to the big city.) She is glad to see the squire, and he in turn greets her pleasantly and asks where she lives. Unfortunately, once she shows him her room, he propositions her (la requist il de villennie), then disappears as soon as she screams. Had she mistaken a living man for a demon, or an imaginary demon for a man? It’s hard to say. But after the squire vanishes, three satanic couples hold an orgy on her bedroom floor, gleefully sounding a trumpet as they depart.146 Other afflictions belong to the symbolic repertoire. Sometimes demons throw Ermine to the ground by night and lie down on her, heavy as stone, cold as ice—the classic incubus fantasy. “Ugly dreams” always denote sexual content. One need not be a Freudian (or an Augustinian) to note the prominence of snakes in her infernal zoo: they slither around her bed, try to stick their heads in her mouth, wind themselves about her neck, and crawl under her dress. To protect herself, she takes to sleeping fully clothed, but even so their stinking breath makes her vomit. Often these phallic serpents are accompanied by toads— disgusting animals that cling to her face, bite her thigh, and leap around between her legs. Toads vexed Christine of Stommeln as well, and we may recall from Chapter 2 that when one of Ida of Nivelles’s clients fornicated with a priest, the saint became aware of it through a vision of toads coupling.147 Ermine’s

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temptations take an unexpected turn when three exotic demons come to dance with her, wearing turbans and fashionable pointed shoes. One strikes up a tune on his pipes and the others begin to dance an allemand, trying—in vain, of course—to make Ermine join their revels.148 But if dancing doesn’t tempt her, remarriage does. Surprisingly, Jean tells us that in July Ermine received two proposals of marriage, even though she was an impoverished widow past childbearing, committed to a religious life. If this is true, she could not have seemed outwardly mad, whatever she experienced in the privacy of her room. Even though she had told Jean many times “that she would rather be burned in a fire” than marry again, her flesh disagreed, for these opportunities afflicted her with “such horrible and strong temptations in her body” that she beat herself bloody.149 In addition to thwarted sexuality and a death wish, her afflictions testify to some realistic fears. Above all, Ermine longed to return to her village, fearing that if she remained in Reims she would die poor and abandoned. What if Jean Le Graveur died before her, leaving her penniless? What if she ran out of provisions for the winter? Such questions are urgently raised by demonic voices. As we have seen, after Regnault’s death Ermine’s “friends” urged her to go home with them, but Jean advised her to stay where she was. Several times these friends return in demonic form. On 26 November, a man from her village asks, “What are you doing here? Aren’t you miserable when you won’t go home with your friends? They have come looking for you many times and would have done you much good if you were with them.”150 When Ermine absolutely refuses to leave, the man begs her at least to take some money from him. In fact, her infernal visitors frequently offer money. Or if she won’t accept the Enemy’s alms, they suggest, why not go back to work while she can? When the summer warmth inspires cabin fever, a voice proposes that while she is still strong, she should spend less time in church and instead gather marsh grass as she once did. If she refuses to look after herself, the voice warns, “a time will come when you will not have a single friend in the world, so you will be wretched and poor.”151 On the face of it, there is nothing sinful about this plan. Ermine was not a recluse, and selling thatch in the marketplace could have relieved the monotony of her days. Had she been more learned, her demon could even have cited Scripture: “Go to the ant, you sluggard, consider her ways and be wise!” (Prov. 6:6). The only reason such advice counts as “temptation” is that it would have reduced her dependence on Jean Le Graveur. Late in her ordeal, Ermine receives more surprising counsel. Although her counterfeit saints at first urge her to moderate her penance, as the year wears on they tell her to adopt a more difficult life. A supposed angel reproaches her for living too comfortably, for at the priory she has bread and wine, clothing, a warm

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fire, and a “beautiful room in which you take great pleasure.” With these amenities, she is far from the apostolic life of Christ’s chosen ones.152 Cunningly, a false Magdalene says the subprior would surely approve of her advice to go and fast in the wilderness, if only he knew the great good she would do.153 After all, even if Ermine were to fast on bread and water all her life and walk on all fours like a beast, she could “never do enough for the love of God.”154 Such mixed messages betray her endless misgivings. Dissatisfied with her religious life, she cannot decide if it is too easy or too hard, so the false saints prey on her confusion. But their contradictions serve Jean’s purpose because the demons’ conflicting advice makes Jean’s own seem like a rational mean, just as Gerson would advise. Not only do these temptations showcase Jean’s skillful discernment, Ermine too manifests dis­ cretio spirituum, rejecting both messages to keep faith with her director. In the vein of greater austerity, a counterfeit St. Paul the Simple warns that she will surely perish if she remains in the “great ease and pleasure” she enjoys: “Is that how one earns salvation and does penance for sins? Is that how the saints acquired paradise?”155 But then the demonic Paul adds a new message that stands out because it occurs only once: “There’s gossip in town that you have had much trouble from the Enemy and he has often spoken to you. They could well throw you in prison and torture you as a witch (une femme sorcière) to make you confess something. It would be better and safer for you, all things considered, to leave this place and go to a region where no one knows you. And if you have any more adventures like the ones you’ve had, don’t ever tell anyone! It’s folly to reveal your secrets when harm can easily come of them.”156 How well grounded was this fear? Blumenfeld-Kosinski points out that in 1398, just two years later, the University of Paris condemned the magic performed by vieilles sorcières. In the same year, the physician Jean de Bar was burned for sorcery in Paris—accused of binding demons to his will with magical formulas. Jean de Bar’s confession survives in a late fifteenth-century manuscript that, eerily, also contains Ermine’s visions.157 If Ermine had been charged with witchcraft, the fact that she did not seem possessed would have counted against her, for perhaps she “often spoke with the Enemy” because she had made a pact with him. The false saints are constantly asking Ermine to trust them (crois [nos] parolles, ayes fiance en moy, and the like), as if soliciting her for a pact.158 Her case would have been further harmed by her identity as a poor widow of low birth, who seemed pious yet could behave quite strangely and bore marks on her body that she ascribed to devils. She also kept a cat that a neighbor once mistook for a demonic beast.159 The late medieval witchcraft mythology was just beginning to take shape, so the faux Paul’s threat was real enough. His warning to tell no one her

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secrets casts oblique suspicion on Jean Le Graveur as well, for if Ermine had been accused as a witch, suspicion would have fallen on him as her closest confidant. Would he have supported her, even under torture? Jean had recently lost many of his followers in Reims for political reasons, so if events had gone differently, his own position might have been less secure than it seemed. At a hypothetical witch trial, one incident especially would have loomed large. Great controversy swirled at the time around the theologian and prophet Jean de Varennes, a canon of Reims Cathedral.160 He had been a high-ranking cleric under the French pope Clement VII (d. 1394). But in 1393 he left Avignon, resigned all his benefices, and withdrew to the hermitage of Saint-Lié in the woods of Nanteuil, not far from Reims. There he said Mass every day and preached against corrupt priests, attracting throngs of disciples and even working miracles. Eventually he began to deny the validity of immoral priests’ sacraments, leading many of his followers to stop attending their parish churches. Until that point, many clerics (including Jean Le Graveur) had supported him. When Clement’s successor, Benedict XIII, was elected, the new French pope broke a promise to end the Great Schism by renouncing his office. Disillusioned, Jean de Varennes responded with a fierce sermon to a large crowd on Palm Sunday, 1396, calling them to withdraw obedience from both popes. This proved too much for Charles VI, who continued to support the Avignon papacy. The king had Varennes arrested on 30 May, and in July, a month before Ermine’s death, the hermit replied to an indictment and twice named Jean Le Graveur as a witness. After that he drops out of the historical record, so he probably died in prison—but rumors were rife. Echoing the excited gossip in Reims, demons told Ermine that Jean de Varennes would become pope and bring peace to the church.161 Later they claimed (falsely) that he had preached in Paris on Assumption Day, converting the king and queen. The whole university supported Varennes, they said, while only the hard-hearted clergy of Reims opposed him.162 Demonic voices expressed indignation with Jean Le Graveur for changing his mind about the hermit. One maintained that he had sinned more gravely than the betrayers of Christ, and another warned Ermine to leave the subprior before she was damned with him.163 These informants reveal how faithfully the laity supported Jean de Varennes. After Jean Le Graveur rejected him, many disciples who had formerly trusted and confessed to him turned away.164 A month before the notorious Palm Sunday sermon, Ermine went to SaintLié to hear Jean de Varennes preach.165 There she was seen by many who knew her. Since the hermit was then at the height of his influence, not yet in trouble with the king, Ermine’s interest might have seemed unproblematic. Perhaps she

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walked to Saint-Lié, rising early to arrive in time for Mass, or perhaps she borrowed a horse from friends. Yet the tale she told Jean Le Graveur wraps her presence at Saint-Lié in such a tissue of fantasies that it at once arouses suspicion. According to Jean, Ermine was summoned by a little girl (who was actually a demon) to come and help a neighbor with her laundry. But as soon as the widow left her house, she was abducted by three demons on black horses who threw her “like a package” on one of them. The horse galloped off at lightning speed, and before she knew it, Ermine found herself in a forest surrounded by demons in black, as well as old friends from her village. She fell to the ground in terror and began to pray, while the demons conversed in an unknown tongue and blew trumpets like an army on the march. When they finally left, a kindly hermit—St. Paul the Simple, making his first appearance—told Ermine she was in the woods of Nanteuil. Because she was lost, Paul pointed out the steeple of Saint-Lié as a landmark to help her find her way home. She headed in that direction and, as it happened, arrived at Saint-Lié just in time for Jean de Varennes’s mass. What to make of all this? By the time Jean Le Graveur edited his text, Ermine was dead, and so presumably was Jean de Varennes. Since he had died in disgrace for heresy, the subprior might have been so nervous about any link between the prophet and his would-be saint that he decided to blame their meeting on demons. Yet Ermine’s tale is not one that any sane person would have made up, and Jean’s tortuous apologia only highlights its absurdities. The most likely explanation, I believe, is that Ermine was in a fugue state, unaware of her actions—just as she was during her suicide attempts. Torn between a longing to hear the fiery preacher and a fear of transgression, she felt such intense inner conflict that she dared not admit her own agency. Instead, she fantasized an elaborate scenario that conveniently left her right where she wanted to be, without having to take any responsibility for getting there. Although she was not technically possessed, she had entered an analogous state in which her mind was eclipsed by supernatural agents. The elements of her tale suggest that she was familiar with the incipient mythology of witchcraft: instantaneous travel on a demon horse, a forest parley with a league of demons, the unexpected presence of old friends. As Blumenfeld-Kosinski points out, the incident sounds like a witches’ Sabbath avant la lettre, though no actual witches appear.166 It could have been this adventure that Ermine “remembered” later when Paul the Simple—the same saint who had escorted her out of the woods—warned her that she herself could be arrested, just like Jean de Varennes, and tried for witchcraft. Jean Le Graveur makes few attempts to interpret Ermine’s aventures, but he employs one key structuring principle. In Part III of his narrative, extending

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from the octave of Corpus Christi (8 June) to the Assumption (15 August), Ermine enjoys two months of relative peace. She no longer sees demons or false saints, though she still hears their voices, while her focus shifts to eucharistic visions. Hearing as many as eight Masses in a day, Ermine repeatedly sees either the Child or the suffering Christ at the elevation of the host. Jean warns her not to desire such visions or regret their absence, yet none is exposed as false, so this phase supplies her with a new devotional outlet. Interrupted by the drama of Jean de Varennes, the visionary sequence reaches a climax at the Assumption, when Ermine is gifted with a celestial concert and a visit from the Virgin Mary. Since she had only eleven more days to live, this pious material leads straight into an account of her holy death and postmortem appearance (as a beautiful, smiling lady in white) at the deathbed of a child. Thus Jean situates his heroine’s demonic purgatio as the prelude to her mystical illuminatio: God “cleansed her of her sins by the torment the demons inflicted on her, before showing her the things he wanted to show her.”167 This frame gives his text a minimally hagiographic shape. It is pleasant to think that Ermine at last found some peace before her death, though it is possible too that Jean suppressed further demonic material. If this is how Jean Le Graveur structured his Life, how did he structure Ermine’s actual life—even her psyche? The figure of St. Paul the Simple, a disciple of St. Anthony, provides an essential clue. This saint, the most prominent in the text in both authentic and counterfeit forms, had no popular cult in France, no relics or feast day. So we can only assume that Jean Le Graveur chose him as an appropriate patron saint for Ermine, perhaps urging her to seek his prayers. Once her vexations began, it would have made sense for her confessor to tell her about St. Anthony and his disciple, providing apt models for fending off assaults and temptations.168 Paul the Simple could have appealed to Ermine for several reasons. A peasant, he became a monk only late in life after leaving his marriage; he was known for his ability to discern and cast out demons; and his epithet, “the Simple,” made him a person with whom an illiterate woman could identify.169 Of course the tales about St.  Anthony might have given Ermine some ideas, but her dark imagination was probably fertile enough on its own. One of her key disciplines was the requirement of daily confession, creating an intense intimacy between confessor and penitent. As we saw in Chapter 2, in extreme cases a confessor (even a layman or -woman) could go so far as to read the mind of a client, gaining extraordinary influence. Both Jean Le Graveur and Jean Gerson place loyalty to one’s confessor at the very heart of discretio spiri­ tuum. Consequently, the demons’ most urgent desire—in the form of taunts, threats, and dubious counsel—is that Ermine should leave the subprior. She

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proves her fidelity (heightened by Jean’s self-serving narrative) when she refuses to do so. But her interlocutors enable an interesting strategy. Because anything the demons say is automatically discredited, they can say whatever they like, voicing a strenuous critique that would other wise find no place. For Jean Le Graveur, the demons’ opposition vindicates his own wise direction and his penitent’s holy simplicity. But for Ermine herself, the detailed reporting of demonic voices allows her yet again to assert some agency while denying it. Her own rebellious thoughts, projected onto false saints and demons, get a full airing, while she herself remains innocent. One of the most trenchant critiques comes from a counterfeit St. Augustine, who claims that the host Ermine had received at her parish church at Easter was nothing but bread. But the true host, which he himself will give her, is actually God—and he proves it by showing her the Child in that host! Thus Ermine’s “real” eucharistic visions are prefigured by a demonic one, as if to argue that the sacraments are authentic only when bolstered by visionary experience. The faux saint’s offer echoes Jean de Varennes’s Donatist teaching that immoral priests could not truly consecrate. The pseudo-saint then launches into a diatribe against Jean Le Graveur: “You’re completely out of your mind (toute hors du sens),” he tells Ermine, for you won’t let anyone do you good. And you believe this subprior, who is only a false hypocrite, for he is destroying himself and you and many others with his false doctrine. He takes nothing to hear people’s confessions, but this is not because of any real goodness; it is to have the reputation of being a good man. He also blames women for their mantles and their sleeves and ornamental cuffs. But he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. This is not something that displeases God, for everyone who has the means can dress as they like without sin. You believe what he tells you and act like a fool. For what he really wants is that the women he criticizes for their apparel should sell their mantles and pointed sleeves and give the money to the priory. So abandon his false teaching and believe me!170 This demonic message reinforces earlier testimony from Marie Descordail, a deceased friend, whose ghost had also been a demon. Marie had asked Ermine to give Jean a special message from the afterlife “ because,” she said, “I love him”: namely, people are never damned for what they wear, nor for dancing, but only for unconfessed mortal sins like murder, theft, and adultery. The subprior “worries

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his head too much” (travaille trop sa teste) about women’s apparel and should just leave them alone!171 This theme comes up so often that it likely reflects Ermine’s real views. Even if she could not afford elegant fashions herself, she must have sensed the misogyny in such tirades. The pseudo-saint’s critique echoes the anticlerical satire of Jean de Meun and Chaucer: behind every prude stands a venal, self-serving hypocrite. For all her loyalty, Ermine harbored dissident thoughts that the demon cogently voiced for her. Other false saints harp ceaselessly on Jean Le Graveur’s faults. They say the priest is at best only mortal, and his about-face on Jean de Varennes shows that he is not infallible. Since he betrayed the hermit, he could easily betray Ermine as well.172 The most withering charge comes from a false Paul the Simple, who echoes Ermine’s favorite phrase: since she is not worthy to see anything good, it follows that her eucharistic visions are fakes, like the illusions produced by magicians. In fact, she deserves to be beguiled by false visions because she still believes the subprior—“and how could he advise you for your salvation when he is damned himself?” As proof, Paul warns her that the very next day, Jean “will solicit [her] for whoredom” (ribaudie).173 This threat prompts Ermine to a more than usually fervent act of commitment: “I will believe in the subprior all my life, and I have made a covenant and will never fail him. God assigned me to him, so I must never leave him.”174 Such quasi-marital loyalty, coupled with the intimacy of daily confession, can explain Ermine’s fear of improprieties. Her sexuality was far from dormant, and salacious gossip was the norm whenever a devout woman developed such a visible bond with a priest. So, whether or not Jean and Ermine felt any physical attraction, people were probably talking as if they did. Dying of the bubonic plague at the age of forty-nine is not an enviable fate. But for Ermine, a quick, pious death might have come as deliverance from a truly intolerable situation. (In fact, she was said to have contracted the disease while burying a plague victim—perhaps her last, finally successful suicide attempt.)175 In reading Jean Le Graveur’s narrative against the grain, I repeat the move Gerson himself made late in his career—interpreting Ermine’s nightly tormentors not as actual demons from hell but as delusions produced by acute physical and psychological distress. If that is the case, we are more than justified in reading their voices as expressions of Ermine’s own unacceptable thoughts and feelings, projected onto demons and counterfeit saints. They tell us what the poor woman really wanted to do: return to her native village and the company of her old friends; perhaps remarry and enjoy sexual relations; spend more time outdoors, attending the round of pardons at local churches; achieve financial security; allow herself some innocent pleasure in pretty clothes and dancing; and above all,

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trust a merciful God to forgive her sins, with no need of further self-torment. These wishes, I submit, are eminently sane, and there is nothing especially sinful about them. But they all became illicit at one blow when Ermine bound herself to Jean Le Graveur, making a vow that combined the obedience of a monk with the fidelity of a closely kept wife. Like Griselda, another peasant woman whose tale was then at the height of its popularity, Ermine had placed all her spiritual eggs in one basket. Her salvation now hinged on loyalty to her vow: never to leave her confessor, come what may, or act against his wishes. I do not claim that Jean was an evil man—that he deliberately set out to destroy a woman he might have seen as a diamond in the rough, a potential saint in the making. Yet that was precisely the effect of his direction. Like Griselda, Ermine kept her vow—at unspeakable cost. Jean provided her with shelter, sustenance, protection, and solicitous care; in effect, he promised her salvation in return for obedience. The price, however, was a near-starvation diet, fierce penitential tortures, constant fear of damnation, an isolating and monotonous routine, and separation from all her old friends. Perhaps what finally drove her to the breaking point was ambivalence about Jean himself—and this is where she differs most from Christine of Stommeln, who straightforwardly loved Peter of Dacia. Ermine’s vowed, conscious self speaks of nothing but love, trust, admiration, and dependence. She will never leave her confessor, never disobey or believe any harm of him. But her ferociously repressed self, voiced by the demons and false saints, tells a different story. For this “demonic” self, Jean is a liar and a hypocrite, misogynist in his obsession with women’s dress, financially on the make for his priory, more protective of his own reputation than of other people, and not only damned himself but leading her into damnation with him. His turn away from Jean de Varennes hit Ermine especially hard. However much or little she understood of Schism politics, the charismatic preacher had brought some excitement into her life; perhaps he would indeed become pope and bring peace to the church.176 At immense psychological cost, she had broken away from the priory long enough to hear him preach. When this final hope is dashed by the hermit’s arrest and Jean Le Graveur’s rejection of him, the false saints go into overdrive, defending the defeated prophet with protest after protest. Many women had actively chosen a lay penitential life, but Ermine had at best chosen it passively, scarcely understanding what it would entail. Once the reality sank in, it was too late to change course without damning herself. So her sanity cracked beneath the burden. She spent much of each day in church, a devoted widow, making her confession each morning, hearing numerous Masses, and engaging in pious works such as burial of the dead, which finally killed her.

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By night, however, she entered a phantasmagoric world of apparitions and voices, each more horrible than the last, defending herself against the demons like a new St. Anthony (on Jean’s telling), even as she rejected any suggestion that might have consoled or saved her. Moderation in penance, thoughts of God’s mercy, alternative ways of life—all had to be ruled out of court. As one escape hatch after another closed in her face, little remained but self-destruction, and this Ermine attempted time and again. At the urging of infernal voices, in the grip of delusions so powerful that she had no idea what she was doing, she tried repeatedly to jump out her window, hang herself, burn herself, beat herself to a pulp, or cut her throat with a knife. The next morning, she would faithfully tell it all to her confessor, reporting the latest tortures inflicted by her demons. And Jean Le Graveur, hopelessly gullible yet secretly admiring the saint he was trying to fashion, praised Ermine for her fidelity and wrote everything down. Throughout this book, we have explored the permutations of coinherence, asking what it can mean to form oneself through another or, in this chapter, to lose oneself in another. Ermine of Reims longed to give herself to God. But the route to him led through her confessor, and by resigning her whole will and agency to a mortal man, she succeeded only in losing her mind to demons. So I return in closing to the analogy with Griselda, that legendary abused wife whose tale circulated in many languages. John Bugbee, in his probing study of “conjoint agency,” finds in her case a dilemma much like Ermine’s. He posits that when Petrarch created his version of Griselda’s story, he was performing a Stoic thought experiment: what would it look like if a person could truly abandon her will, giving it up to another once and for all? To keep his experiment pure, Petrarch makes Griselda an unfeeling automaton, suppressing the agony that such a surrender would entail in the real world. But Chaucer’s more pathetic version, which we know as The Clerk’s Tale, answers the question differently by letting that agony back in. “With its picture of ordinary suffering breaking through the cracks in a nearly superhuman but still insufficient attempt to suppress it, [Chaucer’s tale] has the flavor of an exasperated reply: it would look absolutely horrible.”177 And in the strange case of Ermine of Reims, it does.

Hell’s Martyrs: Toward a Theory of Obsession Christine of Stommeln and Ermine of Reims represent the most egregious medieval cases of obsession—or, as Peter of Dacia and Jean Le Graveur would have it, demonic martyrdom. A whole series of later saints suffered similar torments at

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the hands of demons, including Francesca Romana (d. 1440), Colette of Corbie (d. 1447), Eustochio of Padua (d. 1469), Maria Maddalena de’ Pazzi (d. 1607), Alfonso Rodriguez (d. 1617), Juan del Castillo (d. 1628), Veronica Giuliani (d. 1727), Mariam Baouardy (d. 1878), and Gemma Galgani (d. 1903)—as well as the Curé d’Ars and Padre Pio, discussed at the end of Chapter 2.178 But most of these saints faced demonic opposition while exercising some ministry, whereas Christine and Ermine are known solely for their obsession. So in them we can study the condition in its chemically pure state, as it were. To understand why some theologians elevated such figures to the orbit of holiness, while others looked on in horror, we need to understand three factors. First, a developing cultural script of demonology established normative beliefs about demons and the ways that possessed and obsessed persons behave. Second, not surprisingly, these aspects of demonic activity correspond to a pattern of acute psychological distress in the subject, with symptoms leading in many cases to breakdown. In the third place, a particular form of late medieval spirituality helps to explain why demonic torments impressed some writers, but not others, as an index of sanctity. Central to late medieval and early modern demonology are the following principles. Demons are fallen angels who have leave from God to tempt people, but even if they act by divine permission, their motives are entirely malicious. Hence “the Enemy” is one of the most common epithets for a demonic actor. Demons take pleasure in causing every kind of pain and harm, but above all in procuring a soul’s eternal damnation. Hence they exert their greatest efforts against souls pledged to the religious life or striving for radical holiness. Typical demonic apparitions take the forms of monsters, savage or disgusting beasts, and dark-skinned humans.179 But devils can also produce counterfeit visions of Christ, the Virgin, angels, and saints, in keeping with the axiom that “Satan disguises himself as an angel of light” (2 Cor. 11:14). Though they sometimes appear in visible form, demons manifest themselves more often as audible or internal voices. While they can suggest any kind of sin or crime—as well as “holy” thoughts meant to awaken pride—their most frequent temptations are to suicide, blasphemy, and heresy, as well as sexual activity. More controversially, many believed that demons could inflict physical harm, either by causing illness or by direct blows to the body. They could act either through full possession or, more commonly, through obsession. In practice, the line between these states is not absolute, for an obsessed person might be forced to do or say something against her will, temporarily entering a possessed state. Especially pertinent is Richalm’s belief that demons “can speak through our mouths and act through our limbs” just as we ourselves do, sometimes even without our knowledge.

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Because they are masters of deception, a soul can be deluded by either their presence or their absence—mistaking divine visions for demonic ones and vice versa, failing to recognize the source of a temptation as demonic, or conversely, positing demonic activity where none is present. Demoniacs come in many forms. Some appear only briefly in exempla or miracle tales, so it is not always clear how they became afflicted. Caciola points to two competing theories, a clerical view in which possession results from sin and a more popular one in which it’s simply bad luck.180 In a story from Gregory the Great, endlessly repeated, a nun is possessed when she forgets to cross herself before eating a lettuce leaf on which a demon happens to be sitting.181 Often the possession results from a curse, a view that gained currency over time. By the seventeenth century, the Roman rite required exorcists to ask the demon, Quis te magus immisit? (What magician sent you here?)182 But in saints’ Lives, demonic attacks usually begin with penitential asceticism. The regimen adopted by Christine of Stommeln and Ermine involved near-starvation fasting, prolonged sleep deprivation, and the wearing of hair shirts and rope belts, devices specifically intended to damage the skin and expose it to vermin. If these and other exercises such as scourging, eating rotten food, sleeping on stones, and exposure to extreme cold were inflicted on prisoners, they would qualify under international law as torture, which authoritarian regimes (including the late medieval church) have long employed as a technique for mind control. A strong, determined spirit—a Henry Suso, for instance, or a Nelson Mandela—might survive a period of torture and emerge even stronger; but the victims are more often broken, whether physically, mentally, or both. Gerson was well aware of this, warning penitents and confessors alike against behavior that could ruin their health and cause profound spiritual damage. The women in our case studies began their regimens of self-torture at physically and emotionally vulnerable moments—one at puberty, the other at menopause. Whether or not their mental health had been sound before (we have no way of knowing), affliction rapidly took its toll. Both women experienced almost identical symptoms of distress, which can be generalized from other Vitae as well. Indeed, the same beliefs I have just represented in terms of demonology can be described in terms of abnormal psychology, if we turn our focus from the demon’s presumed agency to the victim’s subjectivity. The subject of what I will call the “demonic syndrome” begins to have nightmares and vivid, frightening hallucinations. As the boundary between delusion and reality blurs, intense fantasies are mistaken for actual events, and figures in the imagination taken for corporeal demons (again, this is pointed out by Gerson). In addition to demonic visions, the afflicted person

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constantly hears voices, usually negative and unwelcome, although some may be consoling. Often these voices counsel suicide or self-harm, accompanying their words with suicidal actions that the victim may perform unconsciously. Christine, when Peter first encounters her, is banging her head against a wall and puncturing her feet with nails—a behavior pattern that intensifies over time. Ermine attempts more than once to jump out her window. Both women try hanging themselves and afflict their bodies in multifarious ways, but their injuries are always projected onto demons. For perhaps the central aspect of possession, or even obsession, is a loss of personal agency. The subject feels like a passive victim of his or her own thoughts and actions, which seem due instead to the invading force. Richalm expresses this with particular clarity. In perhaps the most familiar symptom of all, extreme sexual repression is coupled with the return of the repressed in lurid fantasies. Christine fantasizes for weeks about taking “the worst kind of criminal” as her demon lover, yet she is so modest that she would rather have her whole leg putrefy than let a male doctor tend her wound.183 Ermine, though she claims to be appalled by the thought of remarriage, imagines an attractive squire from her village coming to town to rape her. Both repeatedly see demonic couples having sex in their presence. The demoniac is haunted by profound self-loathing, obsession with her sins, and an inability to believe in God’s forgiveness. To be sure, these traits exaggerate a tendency found in virtually all late medieval spirituality. But we should not be misled when hagiographers call this disposition “humility,” for it is more like an outright denial of grace. In one of her visions, Christine sees “intolerable torments” prepared in hell and purgatory propter modicum quid—for just a small thing. So, to avoid them, she volunteers to endure yet more tortures on earth. Ermine constantly proclaims that she “can never suffer enough” and “does not deserve to see anything good.” In short, hell comes to those who think they belong there. Despite some talk about the love of God (mainly from Peter of Dacia), the deity courted by these devotees is so punitive and cruel that it’s small wonder if they rebel. In Ermine’s visions, a wide range of rebellious thoughts are voiced by demons in the guise of false saints, who tell her alternately that her penitential regime is either too strict or too lax, that she should leave her confessor and return to her village, that the Eucharist is only bread and her visions fake, and sometimes even that the soul and the afterlife do not exist at all. Christine, in her possessed mode, blasphemes by proclaiming that she—or “he,” the demon—is in fact God and has total power. Such blasphemy inverts the pose of hyperbolic submission and self-denial that these subjects strive so hard to maintain in their nonpossessed state. Finally, the drama of obsession is so all-consuming, coiled so

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tightly around only four actors (the subject, her confessor, God, and the devil), that it can approach solipsism. Other-directed behavior is rare or even absent. But this trait, so marked in Christine and Ermine, is not shared by male saints who persevered, despite the demons’ interference, in such ministries as preaching, hearing confessions, and missionary work. The discourse of discernment, I submit, can be understood in part as a protest against the demonic syndrome and the intense suffering it represents. Scholarly treatments of discernment more often focus on other concerns, such as feigned sanctity and the exalted claims of female mystics. The misogyny of this discourse is undeniable, yet it should not blind us to something no less important: these theologians were, in effect, fighting for the laity’s mental health. Their direct audience consisted not of women but of clerics charged with the ministry of spiritual direction, such as Peter of Dacia and Jean Le Graveur. To understand those clerics, however, we must consider a form of spirituality very different from Gerson’s. It is based on a theology of radical patience, deftly outlined by Richard Kieckhefer in Unquiet Souls, his study of fourteenth-century saints.184 Passivity itself becomes a virtue, cognate with the new emphasis on the soul’s “annihilation” in mystical theology. Sacrificing selfwill and agency, along with health, comfort, friends, and family, is a small price to pay for the surpassing good of union with the Beloved. The catch, however, is that suffering for the love of God might turn out in practice to mean suffering at the hands of demons. In Petrarch’s allegory of Griselda, not only is the abused wife a model of the patient Christian soul. Just as terribly, her abusive husband is a model of God, and we might read the thugs he sends to enforce his will as the afflicting demons. Like Petrarch, the hagiographers of these new obsessae hold up an emergent model of victimhood as an ideal of feminine sanctity, while the advocates of discernment have a more skeptical gaze. If St. Anthony remains the primary exemplar for obsessed women, as Jean Le Graveur implies in proposing St. Paul the Simple as a patron saint for Ermine, that model undergoes a significantly gendered change. Instead of a solitary, heroic athleta Christi in the wilderness, the new obsessa is a domesticated woman confined to church and chamber, if not to her actual bed—where she is reduced to complete dependence. Her broken, suffering body, assimilated to the body of Christ, becomes a source of endless fascination.185 Peter of Dacia comments time and again on Christine’s stigmata, as well as the countless, infinitely varied wounds she displayed on every part of her body. Jean Le Graveur writes with admiration of the many witnesses who beheld Ermine’s bruises, as if they were tokens of sanctity. The “adventures” of both women testify to the sheer reality of

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the supernatural, so that the less credible they seem, the more the hagiographer revels in them—like the demonic shitstorms that pelted Christine, or the demon horse that transported Ermine in a flash to the woods of Nanteuil. A sacred voyeurism marks both texts, as well as many later ones based on the same pattern. Finally, a kind of romantic love shines through these testimonies, though of a strangely inverted kind. St. Jerome once wrote to his friend Asella, “Of all the ladies in Rome but one had power to subdue me, and that one was Paula. She mourned and fasted, she was squalid with dirt, her eyes were dim from weeping . . . continence [was] her one indulgence, fasting the staple of her life.”186 Like Paula, the more gaunt these obsessae made their flesh with fasting, the more livid with bruises, the greater their appeal. Unlike Paula, however, with none of her formidable strength and learning, they were also damsels in distress, appealing to the protective instincts of men like Peter of Dacia and Jean Le Graveur. Peter speaks of his love for Christine—and hers for him—so often that at one point a seventeenth-century redactor feels the need to defend it: “You may wonder at their mutual friendship, gentle reader, as you should. But judge it truly to be spiritual, confirmed by the Holy Spirit with the glue of his own love.”187 As for Jean, after making Ermine vow obedience to him at the beginning of her penitential life, he exults in her extravagant professions of loyalty, constantly repeated in response to objections from demons. The culminating demonic charge against Jean—that he is about to solicit Ermine for ribaudie—suggests a subliminal attraction between the two. Several years ago I wrote about a new type of demoniac that emerged in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries: the “demon preacher,” whose pronouncements about penance and the Eucharist dramatically reinforced clerical doctrine.188 The corpus of Netherlandish saints’ Lives studied in Chapter 2 is filled with exemplary demons, such as the remarkably obedient one who, at the word of Lutgard of Aywières, summoned Simon of Aulne to assist in his own exorcism.189 This optimistic representation of demons—as annoying, to be sure, but easily vanquished by saintly charisma and clerical power—culminates in Thomas Aquinas’s De malo (ca. 1272), the first scholastic treatise devoted solely to demonology. But, as Alain Boureau has shown, the weak demonology of the high medieval schoolmen gave way to a much stronger one around the turn of the fourteenth century. Focusing on Peter of John Olivi, Boureau remarks that “Franciscan demonology . . . liberated demons from the tight prison that Thomas Aquinas had constructed for them,” granting evil spirits much greater powers that were evident, above all, in the “new possessed.”190 Not only does possession become more visible, the saints themselves increasingly suffer from it, as the new

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hagiographic type of the demonic martyr emerges. The Lives of Christine of Stommeln and Ermine of Reims belong to this darker era, far from the optimism of Thomas of Cantimpré or Goswin of Villers. No longer are demons quickly routed by the power of Christ. Rather, they are sent by him, or at least with his express permission, to afflict the bodies and souls of his lovers.

Coda: The Devils of Loudun We began this chapter by considering two opposed but parallel cases, divine and demonic possession, both held to strict limits by the orthodox belief in irreducible personhood. God could unite the soul with himself, but he would never annihilate it (despite the claims of mystics like Marguerite Porete), while demons could possess the body but (despite appearances) never the soul. Human personhood therefore remained intact. The new category of demonic martyrdom, however, challenged that conviction. If a woman like Christine of Stommeln could be both the mystical bride that Peter of Dacia saw in her and the tortured demoniac who appears in her letters, then what use was traditional discernment—and what room might be left for the human person?191 By the long seventeenth century, the Age of Quietism, these trends had accelerated toward an alarming end point. Although Porete’s book had been suppressed and her name forgotten, her theology enjoyed a belated triumph as mystics throughout Catholic Europe taught their disciples about the annihilated soul, passive abandonment to the grace of God, mystical death, and total divine possession.192 Like Porete, some rejected vocal prayer and good works as useless for contemplatives or claimed that the soul perfectly united with God can no longer sin. Like her, too, many of these mystics suffered persecution, among them St. John of the Cross (d. 1591), Miguel de Molinos (d. 1696), François de Fénelon (d. 1715), and Madame Guyon (d. 1717). But such mystics combined their practice of radical passivity and annihilation with a new element that does not appear in Porete’s work. Namely, they admitted that because contemplatives are so vulnerable to demonic assaults, they could expect to suffer obsession by the Enemy. Molinos even taught that it was a waste of time to resist demonic temptations during mental prayer because God permitted them in order to humble the soul.193 Not only were such teachings condemned by anti-Quietists, as one might expect; mystics themselves came to recognize the danger of becoming demoniacs. They sought to empty the soul of all thoughts, images, and sense impressions so that God might fill it—but often it was Satan who got there first.

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While cases of possession could be routine or even “trivial,” as Moshe Sluhovsky claims, they could also become painful, all-consuming dramas— especially when the demons attacked religious women.194 The examples of demonic coinherence I have explored suggest two disturbing conclusions. One is that too great a clerical interest in demons could prolong, encourage, or even incite such dramas. Ermine became obsessed, and finally quite mad, after two years of appalling spiritual direction by Jean Le Graveur. Similarly, Christine of Stommeln fed Peter of Dacia’s fantasy of her sainthood by wallowing in her obsession, perhaps even amplifying it, through the literary genre of demon porn. My second conclusion follows. Wittingly or unwittingly, possessed women could exploit this situation—to the ultimate harm of both themselves and their priests. In such cases, religious women and clerics formed deeply codependent partnerships, with the demons triangulating human relationships gone tragically wrong. This, I believe, is what happened in some notorious seventeenth-century cases, the most famous being the mass possession of Ursuline nuns at Loudun (1633– 40). I will glance briefly at that case to illustrate my points. The tragedy of Loudun unfolded in a deeply traumatized town. As the wars of religion raged on, Loudun had been pillaged and burned by both Huguenots and Catholics. Moreover, an outbreak of plague in 1632, only months before the possession, had killed about 3,700 people, or more than 25 percent of the population.195 So the citizens already had ample proof of Satan’s power. When the drama began, it revolved around its lead actress, Mother Jeanne des Anges—the prioress, then thirty years old. Eight other possessed nuns ranged from the ages of seventeen to thirty-three. Called “girls” in contemporary sources, these young women displayed highly convincing symptoms, including “the most violent, extraordinary, and frightful convulsions, contortions, movements, cries, clamors and blasphemies that one can imagine.”196 From the beginning, the theater of possession attracted skeptics as well as gawkers. Many townsmen accused the nuns of faking it, yet tourists came from far and wide to witness their performance. Offstage, the women confessed and received Communion as if nothing were amiss, but when cued for a public spectacle—bound hand and foot, while shifts of exorcists interrogated the demons—they rarely disappointed. Michel de Certeau observes that “the inhabitants [of the convent] appear to have assumed set roles without difficulty,” for the scenario of possession had a long tradition behind it.197 As I have argued elsewhere, demoniacs resemble the flamboyant multiple-personality cases that proliferated in the 1980s.198 Some at least could move with ease between normal and possessed roles, entering an altered state of consciousness on cue (if not exactly at will) to impersonate

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demons. Two of the nuns had as many as seven, all with distinctive names, gestures, and vocal mannerisms. Like Christine of Stommeln, they could simultaneously suffer torment and yet collaborate with their demons. Jeanne des Anges herself, in a memoir written in 1644 (four years after her healing), admitted that she had enjoyed being possessed: “I saw quite clearly that I was the prime cause of my turmoil and that the demon only acted according to the openings I gave him.”199 Indeed, possession can be a form of performance art. Keenly aware of this, contemporaries made escalating demands for “proof.” In retrospect, the evidence for fraud at Loudun is compelling, but I will cite just one example to show how clerics, deeply invested in the possession, could override their own canons of authenticity. Early in the distressing saga, the skeptical archbishop of Bordeaux intervened, proposing tests to determine whether the possession might be fraudulent. After a medical examination, Jeanne des Anges was to be examined for “supernatural signs,” such as the ability to levitate, to read the exorcists’ minds, and to “say eight or ten words, correct and well constructed, in several different languages.” Accordingly, the team of exorcists tried to make her demon answer questions in Gaelic (scotica lingua), a language known to one of the priests. The demon would not do it. Pressed repeatedly, he finally said it was not God’s will (non volo Deus).200 This is a glaring solecism, for the correct form of the verb is vult. Since demons were known to speak flawless Latin, the elementary error should have proved that the prioress was not truly possessed but improvising from her own limited knowledge. She (or the demon) similarly failed to speak Hebrew, resorting instead to distracting physical contortions. All the learned exorcists would have recognized the supposed demon’s faulty Latin, which violated a key principle of their own demonology. The fact that they did not call off the charade then and there, leaving the nuns to their own devices until they got bored, indicates that they no less than the prioress had a stake in the ongoing spectacle. The show must go on. For Christine and Ermine, clerical absorption likewise prolonged and intensified the demonic drama. But here we see a key difference between the late Middle Ages and the early modern era. Peter of Dacia gained not only spiritual solace but also a literary career from Christine’s obsession; she furnished the sole topic of his writings. Similarly, Jean Le Graveur might have hoped for literary acclaim as well as spiritual profit as the confessor of a saint. Were it not for Gerson’s caution, he might have received it. By the seventeenth century, however, priests had become more vulnerable: before the spectacle at Loudun was over, one had lost his life and another his sanity. Possession was by then closely tied to witchcraft, so when the nuns were asked who had sent the demons into

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their bodies, they fingered a culprit—the priest Urbain Grandier. This cleric, a known libertine, had sexually abused at least one girl entrusted to him for spiritual direction; he had published a treatise against clerical celibacy and a lampoon of Cardinal Richelieu, then at the height of his power; and he may have offended Jeanne des Anges by refusing to serve as the nuns’ chaplain.201 So when the nuns—or rather their demons—named him with one voice as the sorcerer behind their possession, Grandier had little chance. He was not even allowed to attend his own trial before a panel of judges who served at the king’s personal pleasure, and on 18 August 1634 he was burned at the stake. While he confessed many sins, he maintained his innocence of sorcery until the end and refused, even under torture, to name accomplices.202 A few months after Grandier’s execution, the Jesuit mystic Jean-Joseph Surin (1600–1665) arrived to join the growing team of exorcists. Physically and mentally frail, Surin felt too weak for direct combat with demons, so he devised a new method of exorcism. Every day he would whisper mystical teachings in Latin into the ear of Jeanne des Anges, hoping to lead her soul to perfection and at the same time torture the demons until they were forced to depart.203 On one level, this program was a great success. Although her possession continued for several more years, the prioress made so much spiritual progress under Surin’s direction that eventually she herself became a renowned mystic.204 For the time being, however, she seemed to be possessed at once by God and the demons. Meanwhile, Surin’s efforts proved disastrous to himself. One day, overcome with charity for Jeanne des Anges, he found himself offering his own soul in exchange for hers. As he explains, speaking of himself in the third person, “He went as far as to ask to be possessed by the malevolent spirit, provided that God would agree to give her the liberty to enter into herself and to care for her soul.”205 His prayer was answered. Again using the third person, Surin writes: “The demon suddenly pass[ed] from the mother’s . . . body into the father’s.”206 His language casts him and the prioress as co-parents, even while asserting some distance from his own personhood. With this prayer Surin performed an act of coinherence in the strict sense, as intimate as any exchange of hearts, for on some level he had fallen in love with Jeanne des Anges. She was after all a woman of charm, intelligence, and charisma, about his own age, and by this point she fascinated Surin as both a damsel in distress and a spiritual protégée. But while the prioress went on to fame and glory, Surin would spend seventeen years (1637–54) locked in a chamber at a Jesuit college, para lyzed and unable to speak. Even before his possession descended to such depths of misery, he wrote the letter I cited as an epigraph, saying of himself and the demon, “These

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two spirits fight on the same battlefield, which is my body; and my very soul is split.”207 As his possession continued, the Jesuit found himself simultaneously enjoying mystical consolations, helpless as an infant in the arms of God, and knowing he was damned as he fought the impulse to blaspheme or kill himself. In an autobiographical account, written after he finally recovered, he broke with tradition by arguing that demons can possess not only the body but even the soul—and remarkably, they can do so in the very presence of God.208 He spoke from experience. The fraught relationship between Mother Jeanne des Anges and Father Surin offers a fitting close to this study. Brought together by God and the devil, a fragile priest encounters a celebrity nun, and both will be changed forever. Between the intimacy of spiritual direction and the public theater of possession, between the secret person of the heart and the dramatis persona of performance, the mother forms herself through the father, even as the priest loses himself in the penitent. Theirs is at once a love story and a tragedy, a spectacular fraud and a spiritual triumph. This is coinherence carried to its utmost, in all its awesome and terrible depth. It is the potential of a selfhood inconceivably more porous than any we know today.

Conclusion, or Why It Still Matters

After seeing how the permutations of coinherence play out in diverse relationships, have we come any closer to grasping the medieval idea of persona? I have tried to think about persons from a perspective that privileges relationships over “subjects,” an approach that is unusual if not altogether new. That method situates our project within a number of overlapping frames that will, I hope, demonstrate the relevance of medieval thought to broader conversations across the humanities and social sciences. So in this conclusion, which aims to be provocative, I will look at a few more facets of the permeable self through the lenses of several disciplines—cultural history, literature, anthropology, psychology, and ethics. The first two sections range more widely across the ambit of medieval studies, glancing at some other aspects of coinherence. The last three venture further afield to set our findings in dialogue with other discourses, showing how and why the idea still matters. We began by noting that the Latin persona has two complementary semantic ranges. Stemming from its theatrical origins as a mask or character, it denotes a public role, office, or personage. Conversely, its usage in dogmatic theology yields a set of meanings centered on the individual self, personality, or consciousness. It is a truism that in Enlightenment thought, the second sense is the privileged one. Several histories explain how the West arrived at that point; Taylor’s A Secular Age can serve as a synecdoche. But in the premodern world, as in many non-Western cultures, the first sense is primary. Timothy Reiss introduces his study of premodern personhood by noting that in classical antiquity “there was no idea of a self free and independent in its will, intentions and choices; none of a separate, private individual.”1 Medieval thinkers believed in free will, of course, but it was always exercised within concentric circles of what Reiss calls “embeddedness” or “passibility.” Concretely situated within the

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family, the parish, the village or city, the court or guild or monastery, the realm, and the universal church—the Church Militant, Suffering, and Triumphant, the whole community of living and departed—persons were born or initiated into any number of social roles that shaped their duties and choices. A “private citizen” in the modern sense would have been inconceivable. Reiss describes this premodern, embedded self as “pervious,” a synonym for Taylor’s “porous” or my “permeable” self. In the dialectic of performance and consciousness that constitutes personhood, we often assume without much thought that our individual sensibilities determine the roles we choose, the parts we will play in life. But this is a very recent, culturally specific idea. In the medieval world, imposed or inherited roles were far more likely to shape sensibilities. We should not exaggerate the principle, for a degree of social and professional mobility did exist. Peter Abelard rejected his hereditary knighthood to become a scholar; Christina of Markyate passionately resisted marriage to fulfill her dream of being a nun; Adam of Perseigne, a Cistercian abbot, was the son of a serf; Francis of Assisi threw off his merchant father’s mantle to wed Lady Poverty. A village boy— with luck, talent, and the right mentor at the right time—could apprentice himself to a master and become a skilled artisan. Yet, after all due allowances, the socially embedded self still precedes the unique, self-fashioning individual, as Caroline Bynum argued long ago in response to the twelfth century’s alleged “discovery of the individual.”2 It is with this understanding that I proceed to further reflections.

Cultural History: Studying Persons-in-Relation Centering our inquiry on persons-in-relation raises a question that I have so far discussed only in passing. Every relationship involves reciprocity, but that is not the same thing as mutuality. Defined in the strict sense as mutual indwelling, coinherence is a paradoxical relationship that can exist in its fullness only in theological contexts: the three persons of the Trinity, the divine and human natures of Christ, God and the soul, Christ and the church. I have omitted such relationships, except for my account of spiritual pregnancy in Chapter  4, because they would require an altogether different kind of study. But most of the bonds we have examined are unequal: teacher and student, counselor and sinner, nurse and infant, exorcist and demoniac. Even in these asymmetrical relationships, coinherence works in both directions, if rarely to the same degree.

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The student, for example, labors to internalize the teacher, allowing a semiamorous imitation to shape his mind, body, and conduct. The holy woman or lay brother reads the minds of clients, not vice versa. But in each case, the affection vested in such bonds is reciprocal and at times intense—all the more so because religious celibacy left so much emotional energy at the disposal of relationships that were not in principle erotic. In childbearing, both mother and nurse were credited with immense power to shape the infant’s body and life. Yet during pregnancy, the mother’s physical and emotional disposition was also profoundly altered by the fetus. In the highly charged case of possession, the demon-haunted women studied in Chapter 5 indicate that the balance could swing either way. Jean Le Graveur exercised near-total control over Ermine of Reims, but the similar case of Christine of Stommeln looks quite different when viewed from the perspective of relationships. Unlike Ermine, she held considerable power over her devotee, Peter of Dacia. Indeed, the relationship between a hagiographer and a living saint could involve the most complicated, highly fraught forms of coinherence, often rooted in a deep mutual need.3 The lovers discussed in Chapter 3 appear to be the sole exceptions to this asymmetry. Courtly romance used the convention of a lady’s power over her “servant” to balance the overwhelming force of male dominance, positing a fragile equality between lovers. Yet the religious adaptation of the exchange of hearts is so gendered as to reinforce its inequality—for only women exchange hearts with Jesus, and there could be no question of parity between Christ and his brides. The only true relationship of equals in the medieval world was friendship, relying on the classical ideal of the friend as alter ego. Cicero had defined friendship in an oft-cited passage as “agreement in all things divine and human, with good will and charity.”4 An emphasis on sameness at the expense of difference marks not only theoretical discussions of friendship, such as Aelred of Rievaulx’s De spirituali amicitia, but even “bromances” such as the Middle English Amis and Amiloun, in which the idealized friends are born on the same day, die on the same day, and look so alike that even a wife cannot tell them apart. It would be interesting, then, to see how the exceptional equality ascribed to medieval friendship affected perceptions of coinherence between friends.5 Close attention to reciprocity could enhance the study of many other medieval relationships, for example, between artist and patron, doctor and patient, or magician and client. But I will here cite only the broadest, overarching case— relationships between the living and the dead. Medievalists have produced an ample literature on this topic. The intertwined doctrines of purgatory, the communion of saints, and the treasury of merits fostered an array of highly influential

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practices: prayers and suffrages for the “poor souls,” proxy pilgrimages, chantries, indulgences, the multifaceted veneration of saints and their relics, naming customs, the observance of All Saints’ and All Souls’ Day.6 Coinherence in Christ meant that the living could help their beloved dead in purgatory, while the more privileged dead in heaven could help the living. As a doctrinal foundation for such beliefs, the communion of saints can be compared with similar beliefs and practices linked to the veneration of ancestors in other societies. The Ugandan writer Okot p’Bitek, for example, describes personhood in his culture in terms of reciprocal rights and duties in a community death cannot sever: “If [an ancestor] has been an important member of society while he lived, his ghost continues to be revered and fed; and he, in turn, is expected to guide and protect the living.”7 But the Christian doctrine of the afterlife, as elaborated by the schoolmen, proved to be extraordinarily complex because one could never be sure if a deceased friend or relative had been assigned to hell, heaven, or purgatory. For those in hell, nothing could be done. This uncertainty about divine judgments gave rise to a whole subculture of apparitions, otherworld visions, and postmortem vision pacts—all examples of a socially and spiritually vital coinherence. The history of emotions is another field that overlaps with the study of relationships, even though medieval theorists did not necessarily think of affects in a relational context. Following Aristotelian or Stoic tradition, they were more likely to analyze joy, grief, fear, and desire as passions of the individual soul. Nevertheless, most emotions are shared or reciprocal. Richalm of Schöntal, we recall, observed that he often experienced the feelings (affectus) of others to whom he was attached. Some emotions were recognized as complementary: male lovesickness is routinely paired with female pity, as in Chaucer’s Troilus.8 The prized feeling of compassio is the clearest case of a shared emotion, which devotees were directed to cultivate as a way of participating vicariously in Christ’s Passion.9 Medical writers warned expectant mothers and nurses to avoid negative emotions, lest they harm the delicate fetus or infant by osmosis. Further in that vein, Béatrice Delaurenti has called attention to “the contagion of emotions” as a principle in medical theory. Some commentators on the pseudo-Aristotelian Problemata physica noted that people not only suffer because of others’ pain (compassion) but also frequently experience a desire to yawn, shudder, or make love when they see others doing the same. They compared this emotional “contagion” to the transmission of illness.10 In a more positive vein, the Latin language itself privileges the shared character of emotions. Compassio is the most familiar example because it has

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supplied an everyday term in English. But the prefix “com” or “con” (with) is extremely common in Latin emotion words. We have no English terms corresponding to the liturgical congaudere (to rejoice together) or collaudare (to praise together). A great many verbs have both simple forms and con- forms, such as queri and conqueri, to lament (together); miserari and commiserari, to pity (together); memorare and commemorare, to remember (together); cupere and concupiscere, to desire (together). In many cases, the prefix functions as an intensifier to indicate the thoroughness of an action—as if to imply that a shared emotion or mental act is more powerful than a solitary one. Attention to this relationality can only enrich the thriving field of the history of emotions.

Literature: Reading the Self Beyond the Ego A number of familiar qualities of medieval literature can be linked to one particular form of permeability—the coinherence of the individual in the universal, and vice versa. This in itself is not news, but let me suggest a hitherto neglected biblical source for the idea. In the Introduction I argued that Paul’s maxim “As in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive” (1 Cor. 15:22) expresses a deep-seated sense of human solidarity, positing a Platonic form of humanity incarnate first in Adam, then in Christ. The duality of this universal form meant that every Christian had the potential to activate either the fallen or the redeemed self—a state of affairs that Augustine called posse pec­ care aut non peccare, the ability either to sin like Adam or to refrain like Christ. This axiom, the coinherence of the individual and the universal, undergirds the medieval predilection for allegory, with its long line of protagonists bearing names like Will, Anima, or Mankind. (I do not use “universal” in a strict philosophical sense; any one of the disputed views on universals can sustain allegorical personifications.)11 A play like Everyman carries conviction because Everyman is both the universal Man and a given individual, who like the spectator must continually reenact the transition from being “in” Adam to being in Christ. This point was brilliantly made in a production by Frank Galati at the Steppenwolf Theatre (Chicago) in 1995–96. A multicultural cast memorized the entire play and drew lots shortly before each performance to assign roles for the evening, so that a spectator seeing the play more than once might experience Everyman one week as an aging Latina and the next as a muscular Black man. Death, Goods, Beauty, and the other characters also changed bodies each night. By representing the universal through multiple and ever-changing

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particulars, the production forcefully resisted stereotypes to convey the medieval playwright’s austere message: each individual in his or her unique shoes must walk the same pilgrimage. Such a relationship between the individual and the universal, so foreign to modern ways of thinking, shapes other medieval genres as well. In first-person narratives, some form of coinherence between a discrete individual and a more universal self renders the speaking voice unstable in ways that can baffle us. That is why medieval autobiography thwarts readers who approach it with anachronistic genre expectations. Augustine’s Confessions, the first and finest example, beguiles readers with the engaging life of an extraordinary character— his education, friendships and passions, discoveries and doubts. But the author persistently hints at a more generic self, notably in the pear tree episode that reenacts Adam’s fall; and after the protagonist’s conversion from Adam to Christ, his personal narrative ends abruptly. Students often feel puzzled and disappointed at this juncture when, instead of learning more about Augustine’s post-conversion career, they find themselves confronted with biblical exegesis and an all-encompassing meditation on memory and time. It is not that the writer has lost the thread of his story, for the individual was meant all along to be an instance of the universal. Much the same can be (and has been) said about the relationship between Dante the pilgrim and Dante the poet, or Chaucer the naïve narrator and Chaucer the shrewd observer of life. A. C. Spearing has coined the term “autography” for a common type of late medieval writing, in which a narrating “I” vacillates between an autobiographical voice and a more sententious one that utters platitudes about women, old age, flattery, and so forth.12 The first-person voice seems to step “out of character” when it ceases to speak as the individual we had come to know and bleeds into a generic Lover or Moralist. Critics of medieval lyric, whether the grand chant courtois or the devotional song, have noted the same kind of instability or generic quality in its first-person speaker.13 The troubadour’s je, whom nineteenth-century critics liked to read autobiographically, can in fact speak for any lover. His voice carves out a seemingly particular but also universal subject position that all singers and auditors invested in fin’amor can occupy for themselves. The same is true for the penitent, compassionate, or yearning soul that speaks in devotional lyric. Yet none of this precludes a poet’s drawing on his or her distinctive personal experience. Indeed, the tendency to read the fluid je as autobiographical dates all the way back to thirteenth-century critics who composed vidas, or biographies of the troubadours, based on information gleaned from their songs. Such shifts between the

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individual and the universal occur because the medieval “I” is anchored in a relationship of the self to itself that is unfamiliar to us. This “I” presupposes a universal Man who dwells within each individual. Another type of coinherence, this time secular and folkloric, belongs to the fantastic imagination. The self could become so permeable as to straddle the boundary between humans and animals. Despite a religious commitment to human exceptionalism, medieval writers were fascinated with hybridity and loved tales about boundary crossings between species.14 Philosophers held that animals had only “sensitive,” not rational and immortal souls, yet in stories the human can dwell in the animal, the animal in the human. Here, as with the exchange of hearts, hagiography and romance share similar motifs. In saints’ Lives, holy men often establish mutual understanding or friendship with wild animals, overcoming “natural” fears. Long before St. Francis made his pact with the wolf of Gubbio, many Irish and English saints stood on the most intimate terms with beasts. After praying neck-deep in the sea, St.  Cuthbert would emerge to have his feet warmed and dried by otters, while St. Godric of Finchale kept two pet serpents that twined about his legs. Such restored relations are seen as renewing the conditions of Eden, before sin broke the web that had once bound all species in harmony.15 In romance, Chrétien de Troyes’s Le chevalier au lion (Yvain) posits a reciprocity between man and beast that, like Ciceronian friendship, renders the lion a true alter ego of the knight. As we saw in Chapter 3, Yvain runs mad after breaking a promise to his wife, with whom he had once exchanged hearts. Forgetting who and what he is, he abandons such basic markers of humanity as speech, clothing, and cooked food. But after he descends into bestiality, he is befriended by a lion that rises to the level of manhood, displaying the chivalric virtues of loyalty and self-restraint that the knight had forgotten. When Yvain begins to recover, he renames himself “the knight with the lion,” so that in their subsequent adventures, we see the man in the beast and the beast in the man. Only together do they form the knight’s essential being as, for a time, this new coinherence supersedes the intimacy of marriage. Other romances feature protagonists who exist in both human and animal forms. In Marie de France’s Bisclavret, the title character is a werewolf, though a harmless one. Trapped permanently in his lupine form by a spiteful wife, he exhibits courtesy and rationality within the beast’s hide, while the behavior of his wife and her lover shows them to be wolves in spirit. Conversely, in Jean d’Arras’s Roman de Mélusine it is the husband who betrays his wife, a mermaid or serpent-woman, after she has borne him ten sons as an exemplary consort. Despite the bad press of women

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who consort with snakes, the powerful Lusignan dynasty were proud to claim Mélusine as their ancestor.16 These texts can be read from many angles, but I mention them here to show that coinherence, as a principle of mutual indwelling, extended the lines of personhood across a boundary that was not nearly so firm as it seemed.

Anthropology: Comparing Theories of Mind In Chapter 2, we approached the theme of miraculous mind reading by way of the anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann’s remarks on the “Christian theory of mind.” As a term from developmental psychology, theory of mind simply denotes the assumptions ordinary people make about the minds of others. Rarely formulated in explicit terms, such beliefs often pass for self-evident. To learn the art of prayer, Luhrmann argued, evangelical converts must unlearn three postulates that most people in our culture take for granted, namely, that persons are visible, minds are private, and love depends on good behavior. For the Christian, the opposite is true: some persons (such as God and angels) are invisible, minds are permeable, and love is unconditional. Because these principles are counterintuitive, they must be painstakingly learned and practiced. Effective prayer, especially the prayer of intercession, implies a countercultural theory of mind. But in parts of medieval Europe, that theory was normative. Coinherence is, from one point of view, a theory of mind. Insofar as cultural history is an anthropology of the past, it can be instructive to compare this onceprevalent Western theory with others that still thrive in the contemporary world. It is important, however, to avoid the all-too-common dichotomy that sets a sacred, primitive, mythic, “enchanted” view of the world over against a secular, modern, rational, disenchanted one. Here Taylor requires a corrective. Even though Euro-American modernity is anomalous across the span of global history, it does not have a single “opposite,” whether in the European past or among non-Western and indigenous peoples. Theories of mind, like the experiences of personhood they represent, vary more than a simple binary would allow. Ten years ago a large team of anthropologists, led by Luhrmann, held a ground-breaking forum on cross-cultural theories of mind.17 Working in areas as diverse as Thailand, Micronesia, West Africa, the Amazon rain forest, India, and the United States, they identified six basic theories with variants. For example, in the “opacity of mind” theory common in the South Pacific, the mind is permeable only to spirits, not to other humans. In fact, it is considered extremely

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rude to infer people’s thoughts from their facial expressions or behavior. Hence in Papua New Guinea people never ask each other “What do you mean?” and if a child reports that “X is sad,” he will be corrected to “X is crying.”18 The Central American “transparency of language” theory also avoids inferences about other minds, but for different reasons. On this view, speech describes the empirical world, not subjective beliefs about it. There is little vocabulary for inner states, fiction is frowned upon, and a speaker is said to be lying if she voices empirically false beliefs, even if she is simply mistaken. According to the opposed “perspectivist” theory of mind, found in the Amazon basin, the nature of reality is entirely dependent on one’s perspective. All sentient creatures are considered people, and all people drink beer—but “beer” takes the form of blood for a jaguar and mud for a tapir. Not only are minds permeable, they can even flit from one body into another. For example, a human being can morph into a jaguar and still believe he is human, although his own kin now perceive him as a jaguar.19 Luhrmann and her colleagues identified five axes along which theories of mind can be distinguished. Three of these are relevant to our study. The first is Taylor’s question as to whether minds are bounded or porous. Can other minds (including God and spirits) cross the boundary between mind and world, and can thoughts be transmitted without language? Clearly, the medieval theory of mind explored in this book falls far along the “porous” end of the spectrum, holding that both God and demons have the ability to read unspoken thoughts. Through their influence, minds are transparent not only to the blessed in heaven but also to saints and demoniacs on earth. A second axis is how far interiority matters: do thoughts and emotions possess causal force? The medieval theory of mind assigns immense power to interiority. For instance, sins cannot be absolved unless a penitent feels contrition, and acts of faith and charity have potent effects even if they are known only to God. The state of a soul at the moment of death, though it remains unvoiced, can determine its fate. Closely related is the third criterion of “epistemic stance,” the question of whether thoughts and especially imagination count as “real.” Michelle Karnes, a medievalist on Luhrmann’s team, emphasizes the power of imagination: “It is how demons possess you, although also how God delivers prophecy to you. It is how you are led to see, or believe you see, what the magician wants you to. It is even how you affect or move external objects.”20 And it is how a mother’s thoughts affect her unborn child. Because coinherence is grounded in Christian theology, it is interesting to see what happens when missionaries convert a people with a notably different theory of mind. In Papua New Guinea, where the opacity of mind theory prevails,

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newly converted Bosavi pastors strug gled for decades to translate gospel verses that refer to Jesus knowing other people’s thoughts. But they could find no words in their language because the practice “makes little cultural sense.”21 Another ethnic group in the region, the Urapmin, converted to charismatic Christianity in the 1970s. Although they consider themselves fully Christian, their faith creates cognitive dissonance because its demand for sincerity in speech clashes with their traditional belief that language reveals very little about the feelings or intentions of speakers.22 Coinherence is so alien to their theory of mind that these Christians stand far from the thirteenth-century religious culture we have examined, and even from Luhrmann’s American evangelicals. Julia Cassaniti studies Buddhist and Christian communities living in close proximity in Thailand. While the Buddhists emphasize their religion’s central values of serenity, mindfulness, and nonattachment, the Christians (Baptists in this case) have developed new cultural values, stressing “the development of discrete emotions and discursive relationships with each other and their God,” to the extent that the two religious groups have come to form distinct emotional communities.23 But the wider culture strongly believes in permeable minds, a view shared by Christians and Buddhists alike. Because of this potentially dangerous porosity, mental etiquette requires tight control of one’s own mind, for “when the mind is poorly controlled, [its] emotions and intentions become powerful and can enter other poorly controlled minds as ghosts or spirits.”24 Buddhists achieve the desired mind control through vipassana meditation and the healing ritual of “soul calling,” performed by their monks to recall the distracted souls of the mentally ill. The rite bears comparison with Catholic exorcism, which aims instead to banish the intrusive spirit. Possession beliefs are extremely common among world cultures, taking a multiplicity of forms. Giulia Mazza, working with the homeless mentally ill in South India, compares the cross-cultural experiences of Indian and American schizophrenics. Both hear cruel, threatening voices, but the psychotic American understands these as symptoms of madness, while for the Indian they cause madness, being the voices of ghosts or demons. Different etiologies require different treatment modalities. Thus American psychotic patients, operating with a “broken mind” model, are keenly aware of the medications they take, with their helpful and harmful effects. But an Indian patient on similar drugs took little notice of them and sought healing at a Hindu temple instead. Even in psychosis there is rationality, Mazza concludes: “If madness is the result of a supernatural attack or possession, the cure would be to drive out, to purge, and to protect. If madness is the expression of a broken mind, on the other hand, the treatment should aim to

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mend, fill, and consolidate.”25 In other words, cures are more likely to succeed if they respect patients’ cultural understanding of their illness. While exorcism itself can be abusive, in the right hands it can heal. Moshe Sluhovsky observes that the ritual continued to be practiced throughout the late Middle Ages and early modern period because it worked: exorcists “were always available. Their successes were numerous and their failures rare.”26 A diagnosis of demon possession could seem more hopeful than frightening because the prognosis was good. Ermine of Reims might have been better off if her confessor had summoned an exorcist instead of trying to fashion her into a saint. Theories of mind obviously affect education. In many cultures, the mind or brain is understood on the model of current technology.27 Freud’s model was hydraulic; in the 1940s the brain was often compared to a switchboard; today it is viewed as a computer, and we speak of its being “hardwired” to do this or that. The medieval analogy of the seal impressed on hot wax reinforced a cultural emphasis on memory and imitation of the teacher. We still perceive teacher-student relationships as the heart of education, even if we construe them differently, so it may come as a surprise to learn that in the Mayan culture of Guatemala and Yucatan (Mexico), there is little intentional teaching at all. Children’s caregivers do not actively stimulate them to learn particular tasks, and not even young children spend much time trying to attract their parents’ attention, at least not by middle-class American standards. Instead, they pay attention to the world in a diffuse, “wide-angled” way, learning cultural skills by observing them and pitching in to help.28 Theirs is not a textual culture, nor do the Maya have much privilege; the educational system of the Spanishspeaking elites is quite unlike their indigenous folkways. A moment’s thought should raise the suspicion that the children of medieval peasants (roughly 80 to 90  percent of the population) were educated more like Mayan children than like the literate elites in cathedral schools. Finally, there is reason to believe that new theories of mind can be taught and learned. Normally, we absorb our culture’s dominant theory of mind in childhood, but adult choices can require us to exchange it for a new one. Luhrmann’s forum supplies several examples. For instance, American students learning traditional Chinese medicine immerse themselves in a view of the body so incompatible with Western ideas that their whole theory of mind can change in the process. They may even come to see their own thought patterns as resulting from “a tendency to ‘dampness in the middle jiao’ ” rather than their “personality.”29 Religious conversion, I suspect, very often entails shifting theories of mind. If new Christians must learn how to pray, New Age practitioners

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might learn how to remember past lives, communicate with the dead, bond with a spirit animal, sense the vibrations of crystals, heal a client’s energy flow with their hands, and so forth. All these practices involve coinherence. They presuppose a self that is highly permeable and sensitive to divine or cosmic forces. Because of its porosity, it can cross boundaries between living and dead, human and animal, the spirit world and the flesh. To illustrate the difference a theory of mind can make, I know a woman who is convinced that a psychic healed her cat’s anxiety remotely, using telepathic contact and Reiki. On the “Euro-American modern secular theory of mind,” as Luhrmann calls it, this is impossible; yet the cat’s behavior improved dramatically. Coincidence, confirmation bias—or a call for epistemological humility? It is easier to view alternative theories of mind with equanimity when we encounter them in Papua New Guinea or medieval Europe than in our own circle.

Psychology: Saving the Phenomena When a theory of mind is elaborated by intellectuals, it becomes a psychology. But all psychologies, like lay theories of mind, remain culturally specific—and when they gain sufficient prestige, they can become more prescriptive than descriptive. In the heyday of psychoanalysis, it was well known that the dreams of analysands evolved to confirm the theories of their analysts. More broadly, any phenomenon that is widely and deeply studied becomes central to its field, while puzzling “fringe” phenomena may be ignored for so long that their very existence is forgotten. Yet it is often those same phenomena, when someone finally takes note of them, that force a paradigm shift. In this section, I ask how three of the more startling phenomena reported in this book challenge our theory of mind to the point that we may doubt their reality: demonic obsession, telepathy, and the “change of heart” experienced by certain transplant patients. In Chapter 5 I showed that a surprising continuity links medieval and modern accounts of obsession. Many psychiatric patients still describe their ordeals in terms of demonic possession, while several of the disorders we now identify, including OCD, major depression, schizophrenia, and bipolar disorder, can produce symptoms that resemble those of medieval demoniacs. Fr. Gabriele Amorth, the Vatican’s official exorcist for many decades, insisted that even those who were genuinely possessed—a small minority of the thousands who sought his help—needed psychiatrists in addition to exorcisms. In the late Middle Ages, the “demonic syndrome” endured by Ermine of Reims, Christine of Stommeln,

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and others was hotly contested. While some pastors and theologians perceived it as mental illness, others saw it as a crucible for testing God’s saints. Our evidence is not balanced: all the long, detailed narratives of the obsessed stem from their would-be hagiographers, while writers on discernment give only brief, anecdotal accounts. But in Ermine’s case, we do have two conflicting opinions. Jean Gerson, who knew her only as we do—by reading Jean Le Graveur’s narrative—at first commended her prudence and humility, though he vetoed publication of that text for lay consumption. But on further reflection, he changed his mind and said he had been “nearly seduced” about her. Though he does not spell out his later thoughts, it would be consistent with his general views if he had decided there was nothing supernatural about Ermine’s experience. As for Christine, we have the strange information that after decades of demonic tortures, she was abruptly “cured” upon learning of Peter of Dacia’s death. That fact led us to wonder if her mental illness, which had a strong component of exhibitionism, might have resolved much earlier. Yet she continued to perform obsession (at least on parchment) in order to preserve a valued relationship. Though we must doubt the facticity of many details recorded by Peter and Jean Le Graveur, both cases allow for interpretations that take the unhappy women’s suffering seriously without literal belief in their demons. As with the Indian and American schizophrenics, we may disagree as to whether demonic voices are a cause or merely a symptom of madness. But the phenomena are not in question; only the explanations differ. The case of telepathy is harder because many, perhaps most, psychologists do not believe it occurs at all. They are more likely to agree with a stage magician I once saw performing spectacular displays of “mentalism,” the craft term for mind reading. He prefaced his act by reporting that a previous audience member had begged to become his apprentice so that she too could learn to read minds. But he had to disappoint her, he said, because actual mind reading is not possible. Everything he did onstage was pure illusion. He then proceeded to give a performance so compelling as to make the audience, or at least part of it, disbelieve his disclaimer.30 Medieval texts also describe magicians who performed illusions, harnessing the power of imagination to make their audience see fantastic spectacles. But mind reading, as attested in the Bible, was not part of their repertoire. Conversely, the telepathic feats ascribed to Simon of Aulne, Yvette of Huy, and others in Chapter 2 are not likely to have involved stagecraft. These saintly figures were engaged in pastoral counseling, not entertainment, and they did not perform before crowds. To be sure, their hagiographers might have exaggerated by deliberately suppressing any natural sources for their

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knowledge. But the cumulative evidence for their telepathy is so daunting that it compels us to ask: can such feats be possible, or must we ascribe this whole class of miracles to literary fiction or willed credulity? Let us take a short detour to the late nineteenth century and the founders of psychology: William James and F. W. H. Myers. These friends and colleagues expounded their views in monumental books, James’s Principles of Psychology (1890) and a two-volume work by Myers, which he intended to call Human Per­ sonality in the Light of Recent Research. Unfortunately, Myers died before publication, and his editors gave the work a title he would not have approved: Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death (1903).31 Savoring of Christian apologetics, that title has undoubtedly deterred scientific readers. But in fact, Myers rejected Christianity, and, while profoundly interested in paranormal or “psi” (psychic) phenomena, he did not believe them to be supernatural. Rather, he thought they revealed laws of nature that we do not normally experience and therefore do not understand—much as arcane astronomical observations with no bearing on daily life led Einstein to formulate his theory of relativity. Myers was a cofounder in 1882 of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR), whose members included such luminaries as James, William Gladstone, John Ruskin, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Andrew Lang, and Henri Bergson, as well as eminent scientists like Lord Rayleigh, J. J. Thomson, William F. Barrett, Sir Oliver Lodge, and Marie Curie. The psychologist Pierre Janet was also a member; Freud and Jung would later join. To pursue the study of consciousness, these early psychologists investigated such phenomena as hypnosis, hysteria, somnambulism, multiple personality, hallucinations, psychokinesis, trance speaking, automatic writing, telepathy, near-death experience, eidetic memory, and the abilities of savants, who can sometimes “see” prime numbers up to ten digits though they may lack basic cognitive skills. The SPR was also interested in mysticism, as witnessed by James’s classic The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902). In sharp contrast to the prevailing assumption of psychology today, namely, that consciousness is produced by the brain and necessarily disappears at death, James held that the brain does not create mind or consciousness but limits and filters it. When the organ is not functioning normally, its filters fail, producing mental illness. But alternatively, the breakdown of barriers that usually separate the conscious from the unconscious mind (and the self from the other) can enable psi phenomena, mystical experience, and exceptional creativity.32 In the controversial 2007 volume Irreducible Mind: Toward a Psychology for the 21st  Century, a team of six psychologists and others returned to James and Myers to make a case against the ideology of “physicalism,” or neural reduc-

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tionism, and reemphasize the centrality of mind to their disciplines.33 The research findings of the SPR, they insist, must not be sidelined simply because they do not confirm today’s dominant theories. In a polemical introduction, Edward F. Kelly argues that science must privilege facts over theories, so to discount known facts—or worse, whole bodies of evidence—because they challenge a prevailing theory is to fall into mere scientism, a form of fundamentalism. While it will be necessary to revise century-old explanations of the SPR’s empirical findings, the findings themselves are weighty, and many have been reproduced by subsequent researchers. Hence Kelly and his colleagues call for renewed investigation of such areas, hoping that the study of seemingly marginal phenomena will shed light on the central issues of psychology, such as the nature of consciousness and the mind-brain problem. By definition, psi phenomena “involve correlations occurring across physical barriers” that should normally prevent them, thus demonstrating “ human behavioral capacities that seem extremely difficult or impossible to account for” on the basis of neurophysiological causation.34 Many psi phenomena concern aspects of coinherence, such as long-distance healing, maternal impressions on the fetus, and of course, telepathy. In Chapter 2, I offered a medieval explanation of miraculous mind reading that drew on Augustine, Gregory the Great, Goswin of Villers, and Dante. That account would not have been accepted by James or Myers, let alone more recent researchers. It is not my intention here to delve into newer explanations, nor to cite any of the vast anecdotal and experimental evidence that bears on the problem. That would require a different volume—one that I am not competent to write.35 But I do aim to save the phenomena by suggesting that this beloved medieval miracle type need not be rejected a priori as a theological fiction. Although it still defies understanding, it may indeed reveal laws of nature as yet unknown to us. There have been, and still are, theories of mind capacious enough to accommodate it. Finally, the experience of many heart transplant recipients poses a stunning challenge to physicalism that, I propose, might be better explained by medieval reflections on the heart than by the surgeons who perform the operation. As we saw in Chapter  3, the exchange of hearts began as a minor motif in twelfthcentury love lyric, became widespread in romances, and by the mid-thirteenth century had made its way into saints’ Lives. As a symbolic gesture, exchanging hearts expresses the mutuality of coinherence. Each lover’s heart animates the other’s body, expressing a reciprocal indwelling that can occur in either erotic or devotional contexts. What is most surprising about the theme is its insistent drive toward physicality. In the eaten-heart tales, the best being Jakemes’s

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Roman du Castelain de Couci et de la Dame de Fayel, the exchange culminates in the lady’s actual ingestion of the heart of her dead lover, making her both his eternal bride and his tomb. (We should remember that among medieval elites, the heart was often buried separately from the body.) Similarly, Raymond of Capua reports that when St. Catherine of Siena received the heart of Jesus, she experienced not a mere vision but a divine surgery that left a visible scar on her chest. This physicality is even more striking in the case of St. Clare of Montefalco, whose heart was said on autopsy to be inscribed with a tiny crucifix and symbols of the Passion. By an uncanny symbolic trajectory, such tales lead inexorably toward the literal transplant of hearts. That surgery has been performed for more than fifty years, and no one at first expected a kind of experience that has now been widely reported.36 The recipients of new hearts often find themselves developing relationships with their deceased donors, sometimes even coming to know their names and other personal information that had been withheld because the surgical protocols require anonymity. In the most extreme cases, the recipients may undergo personality changes in conformity with their donors, as confirmed by separate interviews with the families and friends of both. However such experiences might ultimately be explained, they bear witness to a personal union that our secular theory of mind cannot account for. The dead person’s soul or mind or memory somehow lives on in the living heart and so takes up residence in its new owner, much as a fetus resides in its mother. But the coinherence of pregnancy ends with a birth, while that established by a heart transplant ends only with a death, as it began. As such uncanny narratives multiply, popular culture transmits them in memoirs, films, and news media, while transplant nurses hear them so often that they have ceased to be surprised. Researchers in integrative medicine have done pioneering studies of the phenomenon. But the mainstream medical (and especially surgical) community rejects it out of hand as magical thinking or a delusional response to the trauma of surgery.37 Most interesting is the debate these claims have provoked in the field of bioethics. Wishing to encourage organ donation, which can be authorized by surviving family members or merely by checking a box on a driver’s license application, the medical establishment promotes it as an altruistic act with no downside. After all, what does a dead person have to lose? Once allowances have been made for blood types and other medically relevant factors, all body parts are treated as interchangeable—except for the brain, now awkwardly standing in for the soul.38 (Just as the soul’s departure from the body used to be the infallible sign of death, for the purpose of transplants the criterion is brain death, while

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other organs remain functional.) But if potential donors—or their families— thought a heart transplant could result in a lifelong bond with an unknowable stranger, would they still consent to the gift? Would the religious be more likely to will such a risky act of love—or less so, fearing to delay their soul’s entrance into heaven? Would recipients hesitate to accept a new heart, not knowing whom they might be inviting into so intimate a bond? Would ancient taboos about cannibalism stage a comeback? The bioethicist Stuart Youngner asserts that, “in an entirely concrete sense, organ transplantation is a form of nonoral cannibalism, that is, the taking of the flesh and blood from one person into another.”39 Like cannibalism, it involves a radical incorporation of the other that is at once aggressive and amorous, as Karl Morrison says of the formula “I am you.”40 In The Wounded Body, Dennis Slattery even suggests that “the wound may be the violent presence of the numinous, or the sacred that enters us through the actions of others.”41 Such humanistic thoughts can make surgeons queasy. But to save the phenomena—to avoid denying a well-attested consequence of many heart transplants—we might need a more flexible, humanistic theory of mind.42 In fact, we might need the medieval idea of coinherence.

Ethics: Establishing Boundaries The permeable self has some distinct advantages over the modern bounded self. Our cultural ethos of atomized individualism, which results in the painful isolation of so many, cannot be overcome unless we are willing to acknowledge our deep embeddedness in the lives of others, to renew our commitment to communities that are both local and transtemporal. Yet, with good reason, the permeable self also makes us uneasy because its fluid boundaries can be dangerous. In fact, advocacy movements of all kinds stress the importance of personal boundaries to prevent abuse and exploitation of the vulnerable. So in closing, I want to confront the discomfort the “unbounded” relationships explored in this book can produce and ask how boundaries can be established, even within asymmetrical relationships, to protect against abuse without stifling intimacy. A cautionary tale from the recent past will set these issues in clearer focus. In Chapter 1, we saw that some medieval intellectuals chafed at the cult of personality inherent in charismatic pedagogy, with its expectation that they should grow up to be the image of their teachers. Physical abuse of boys was common, and while sexual abuse is rarely explicit in our sources, the danger in such an emotionally charged, homosocial environment is obvious. We can sense

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this threat in the anxiety of writers like Peter Damian, as well as the long history of boarding schools. Chapter 2 drew attention to a kind of pastoral counseling so powerful that it could be either deeply reassuring or terrifying. Miraculous mind reading could be, and was, used for the cure of souls; it was also used for public shaming. And since demoniacs had the same telepathic powers as saints, they could employ them to expose alleged criminals—or feign them to take revenge on enemies. The expression of love figured by the exchange of hearts in Chapter 3 depends on the ideology of “two becoming one,” a love experienced not as partnership but as fusion. While this was always more a literary ideal than an actuality, it could drive an abandoned lover like Troilus into suicidal despair.43 Chapter 4 considered the awesome powers ascribed to midwives and wet nurses, who could save a dying infant’s soul or shape the limbs and character of a living one. But their powers were frequently too awesome for comfort, leaving lower-class women at risk of blame by the families that hired them if a birth went badly or an infant failed to thrive. In modern analogues, the rights of surrogates and genetic parents vis-à-vis adoptive parents remain highly contested. Finally, Chapter 5 reinforces a truth medievalists have long known: late medieval confessors could exercise unlimited power over their penitents, especially women who were striving to lead holy lives. All these relationships were meant to form a healthy or saintly identity in close communion with others. Yet, while no human relationship is exempt from the potential for abuse, coupling intimacy with a differential in power requires particular caution. So when the self is at its most malleable and vulnerable—as with an infant, a schoolboy, or a contrite sinner desperate for mercy—what boundaries are needed to establish an intimate relationship that preserves the dignity of the person? A good starting point for thinking about the ethics of relationships is the work of Martin Buber (1878–1965), a major voice in the philosophical movement known as personalism.44 An Austrian Jew, Buber escaped to Jerusalem under the Third Reich and achieved wide recognition in the postwar years. He published his classic Ich und Du in 1923, the same year as Freud’s even more influential Das Ich und das Es.45 For Buber, the dignity of persons-in-relation is central to the meaning of life. He identifies two “basic words” to name human ways of being in the world: I-You and I-It. But the I that says You is not at all like the I that says It. To say You is to address the other with one’s whole being in a vibrant, immediate encounter, which is always life-giving. To say It, on the other hand, is to use or experience the other instrumentally, as a means rather than an end. I-It relations are necessary for human survival, so they should not be demonized. Yet to have only I-It relationships, to reduce every possible You to

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an It, is to be less than human. Buber specifies that “the I of the basic word I-It appears as an ego,” or individual (Eigenwesen), while “the I of the basic word IYou appears as a person.” These contrasting forms of the I differ not only in their relation to the other but also in their self-awareness: “The person says, ‘I am’; the ego says, ‘That is how I am.’ ”46 Importantly, the You and the It are determined not by their own natures but only by the attitude of the I. Thus an It can be a person, a thing, a project, or a field of study. While a You is most often another human being, it can also be God, a cat, or even a tree.47 The Divine, as the eternal You, is the ultimate ground of all relationship and can be encountered in any genuine meeting between an I and a You. Thus “the relation to a human being is the proper metaphor for the relation to God,” who is neither separate from the world nor reducible to it. Rather, he is that paradoxical You “in which the lines of relation, though parallel, intersect.”48 Interestingly, Buber renounces mystical union (which he had apparently experienced) because any dissolution of the I in the You destroys the very ground of relation. Here he converges with medieval theologians who rejected the teaching of Meister Eckhart.49 So primal is the I-You relation that it precedes any sense of self. In fact, “man (der Mensch) becomes an I through a You” and not other wise.50 All personhood begins with the coinherence of mother and fetus: “The prenatal life of the child is a pure natural association, a flowing toward each other, a bodily reciprocity; and the life horizon of the developing being appears uniquely inscribed . . . in that of the being that carries it.” As a Jewish saying has it, “In his mother’s womb man knows the universe and forgets it at birth.”51 Giving an account of infant development very different from Freud or Lacan, Buber sees the newborn pulled away from this unconscious I-You relation only to develop conscious ones, for which she yearns so deeply that she will say You even to a teddy bear. In an afterword to I and Thou written more than forty years later (1957), Buber addresses the issue of ethics in asymmetrical relationships. Because many I-You relationships are unequal, he notes, they necessarily fall short of complete mutuality. One of these is the teacher-student relation, another that of therapist and client. Both teacher and therapist, he asserts, “must stand not only at [their] own pole of the bipolar relationship but also at the other pole, experiencing the effects of [their] own actions.”52 A good teacher must try to perceive the educational relationship both from his own perspective and, as far as possible, from the student’s—much as Augustine had advocated in the fifth century. Buber calls this effort Umfassung, “embrace” or “inclusion.” While the student should likewise affirm the personhood of the teacher, he cannot adopt his point of view in the same way. If he could, the relation would lose its essential character and

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develop into a friendship. Similarly, the therapeutic and the pastoral relationship demand an intense, reciprocal, but unequal partnership. In other words, the asymmetry must be frankly acknowledged and accepted. The needs of the more vulnerable partner do not permit the kind of mutuality that is proper to friends. Therapy offers the closest modern parallel to the kinds of relationships analyzed in Chapters 2 and 5, and because of its unique intimacy, power, and danger it has been extensively scrutinized. Within psychoanalytic literature, a whole subfield studies the transference and countertransference—how the analysand’s and analyst’s feelings toward each other affect the therapeutic relationship. Professional therapists have developed an elaborate code of ethics meant to protect both therapist and client in their intimate, mutually vulnerable, but always unequal work together. Love affairs between therapists and clients, as between teachers and students, are strictly out of bounds. At the end of the twentieth century, however, the rationale for that boundary came under fresh scrutiny. A well-known lesbian feminist theologian, Carter Heyward, challenged the professional code of ethics in her 1993 book, When Boundaries Betray Us. Having fallen deeply in love with her therapist, Heyward wanted to move beyond their professional relationship into an erotic friendship, which the psychiatrist refused. The situation was atypical because we normally expect such requests to be initiated by the more powerful partner—a therapist, teacher, priest, pastor, coach. But in this case, it was Heyward who pushed repeatedly for an intimate relationship, charging her resistant therapist with refusing mutuality and clinging to the shibboleth of “boundaries” in order to preserve her oppressive power and privilege. Shattered by her rejection, Heyward characterized the lesbian therapist’s insistence on professional boundaries as downright patriarchal. Boundaries is a moving and deeply troubling book—part memoir, part manifesto—that speaks directly to the issues we have been investigating. “We western white people,” Heyward writes, “tend to make far too much of our individualities. . . . And we make far too little of what Charles Williams called our ‘co-inherence’ and Martin Buber understood to be the basis of an ‘I-Thou’ experience of our life together.”53 Taking relationality as the heart of her theology and ethics, Heyward demonstrates a profound commitment to “mutual coinherence,” which she calls “the essence of healing and liberation for us all.”54 In her life as well as her writing, she intentionally cultivates a permeable self, a deep openness to the reality of others on both conscious and unconscious planes. Unlike our medieval subjects, however, her feminist commitments lead her to reject hierarchy and, indeed, all asymmetry in relationships. Heyward’s ideal is a progressive overcoming of power differentials in pursuit of greater mu-

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tuality, so that friendship becomes the goal toward which every just relationship tends. Heyward lets the reader know that she took her dissertation director as her lover and life partner (after she had completed her Ph.D.) and that she shares personal issues with her students, although she admits that this makes some of them uncomfortable.55 Her wish to establish a close friendship with her therapist was thus far from the first time she had rebelled against conventional boundaries. But in this case, the psychiatrist’s rejection wounded Heyward so deeply that, by her own admission, she began to fantasize episodes of childhood sexual abuse in order to retain her interest and sympathy. Later on, she acknowledged that this abuse had not actually happened to her and explained her false memories as resulting from a kind of mystical coinherence: “What I experienced really happened to someone or some ones, somewhere, at some time. It was not a lie, not a falsehood, not a fiction that I concocted and entered for a while. It was an actual life experience of a person, or persons, being raped and beaten.”56 Heyward came to believe that her psychic pain had opened her to experience the still greater pain of unknown others. It can be hard to distinguish the writer’s ethical case against boundaries from the disappointment and rage of a rejected lover. But most reviewers, writing from within the feminist and queer communities, found Boundaries disturbing for the same reasons that readers of this book might have been disturbed by the relationship between Peter of Dacia and Christine of Stommeln, or the endless stream of letters sent by Hildegar of Poitiers to his old teacher, Fulbert of Chartres. In cases like these, one party in desperate need violates boundaries by failing to respect the other’s realistic limitations and wishes. Marie Fortune, a therapist who works with sexual assault survivors, responded to Heyward along the same lines proposed by Buber forty years earlier: “A professional relationship cannot at the same time be pastoral, therapeutic and healing—and mutually intimate. When pastor and congregant move from the professional, pastoral relationship to a mutually intimate relationship, they give up the pastoral relationship.” In therapy, likewise, “professional boundaries can be flexible, but they should not be fluid.”57 Once the therapist begins to share her own feelings and “issues” with the client, the relationship has ceased to be therapeutic. Mary Hunt, herself a lesbian feminist theologian, points out in a review article that even between two women of the same orientation, No means No. Far from “betraying” Heyward, she believes that firm boundaries in her relationship crisis “kept a bad situation from getting worse.” Hunt is especially troubled by Heyward’s version of mystical coinherence, which she sees as “set[ting] up the religious professional as a medium” to mystify the very real violence suffered by

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women and children.58 Finally, a searching essay by K. Roberts Skerrett locates Heyward’s error in a naïve assessment of “feminist eros, [which] promises to combine the ecstasy of orgasm with the equanimity of justice.” In her eagerness to cast aside a typically Christian (and medieval) hostility toward sex, Heyward succumbed to the reverse—an unrealistic idealization of eros. People in all times have suffered the pain of unrequited love. But an ethic that refuses to confront the tragic dimension of eros, to acknowledge that “right relation” and erotic pleasure are often at odds, cannot embrace the “practical wisdom that sees renunciation as a positive discipline of love.”59 Renunciation, of course, is a “positive discipline” very familiar to medievalists. But it seldom occurs alongside a real valuation of intimacy—including, but not limited to, the erotic. In an extraordinarily thoughtful book on “the ethics of sensuality between unequals,” the ethicist Cristina Traina takes the parentchild relationship as a model of asymmetrical relations in which a kind of eros (not to be confused with adult sexuality) is never absent. Without affectionate touch from parents or caregivers, no child can thrive. What Traina says about touch can apply equally to other, less physical kinds of intimacy, mutatis mutandis, in any helping relationship where one partner seeks to nurture another who is more vulnerable. But Traina maintains that it is not realistic to expect, or even desire, complete mutuality as Heyward does. Differences in age, health, skills, and ability will always exist, even in a world more just than the one we know. So, given the reality of asymmetrical relations, Traina proposes the virtue of “erotic attunement” as a mean between the extremes of rigor and abuse. “Mutuality,” she writes, “is essential to human relationships. It is unquantifiable. It is also the point of anxiety in relationships between unequals, in which the threat of abuse parading as affection always looms.”60 One extreme lies in actualizing that threat, allowing an untrammeled eros to violate boundaries or failing to establish them in the first place. The opposite extreme is subtler but no less harmful: enforcing boundaries with inhuman rigor, as when a preschool teacher cannot hug a crying child for fear of abuse. In the relationships examined in the present book—intimate, intense, and usually unequal—we can find instances of precise attunement, as well as cases where the virtue fails. As Martin Buber, Charles Williams, and Carter Heyward all observe, coinherence is in theory a deeply inspiring, attractive ideal. It is also one that requires extraordinary care in praxis. In this untidy conclusion I have tried to show, by pursuing multiple paths, that the study of medieval relationships has applications well beyond those I have explored. Within the field of medieval studies, our approach holds promise

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for the investigation of problems ranging from the history of emotions to the theory of allegory. More ambitiously, I have argued that if the person still matters, the Middle Ages matter. Rooted in the fine points of Christian theology, coinherence is not the only medieval account of personhood, yet it proves to be everywhere. The idea expresses a way of being human—a different type of selfhood, an alternative theory of mind—that is largely alien to the contemporary West yet finds many parallels elsewhere. From heart transplants to telepathy, it opens new vistas. Not all of them will please all readers; some may produce distinct unease. Yet the challenge of the past, which embodies the challenge of the cultural Other, may be the most important gift a historian can give the future.

Notes

The following abbreviations are used in the notes and bibliography: AASS Acta Sanctorum . . . editio novissima, ed. J. Bollandus and G. Henschenius et al. (Paris: Palmé, 1863–) AH Analecta hymnica Medii Aevi, ed. G. M. Dreves and C. Blume, 55 vols. (Leipzig: Reisland, 1886–1922) CCCM Corpus christianorum: Continuatio mediaeualis (Turnhout: Brepols, 1966–) CCSL Corpus christianorum: Series latina (Turnhout: Brepols, 1953–) CSEL Corpus scriptorum ecclesiasticorum latinorum (Vienna: Kirchenväterkommission of the Austrian Academy of Sciences; Salzburg: Department of Ancient Studies and Latin at the University of Salzburg, 1864–) EETS Early English Text Society MGH Monumenta Germaniae Historica (Hannover: Hahn, 1826–) PL Patrologiae cursus completus: Series latina, ed. J.-P. Migne et al., 221 vols. (Paris: Migne, 1841–55), with searchable database by Chadwyck-Healey SC Sources chrétiennes (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1941–)

Introduction. Members of One Another 1. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007), 29–30. 2. Ibid., 35. 3. In early modern English, “individual” meant “indivisible,” as in “the holy and indiuiduall Trinity.” On the individual as a historical problem, see Colin Morris, The Discovery of the Indi­ vidual, 1050–1200 (London: S.P.C.K., 1972); Caroline Walker Bynum, “Did the Twelfth Century Discover the Individual?” in Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 82–109; Rob Faesen, “ ‘Individualization’ and ‘Personalization’ in Late Medieval Thought,” 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), 35–50. 4. Alan of Lille, The Plaint of Nature (De planctu Naturae), in Alan of Lille: Literary Works, ed. and trans. Winthrop Wetherbee (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 22–23. 5. Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (London: New Left Books, 1971), 121–76.

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6. Timothy J. Reiss, Mirages of the Selfe: Patterns of Personhood in Ancient and Early Mod­ ern Europe (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 8–9, 25. 7. Thomas D. Williams and Jan Olof Bengtsson, “Personalism,” in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward  N. Zalta (Summer 2013 Edition), http://plato.stanford.edu/archives /sum2013/entries/personalism/. 8. J. F. Niermeyer, Mediae Latinitatis Lexicon Minus (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 1030–32; The­ saurus linguae latinae (Leipzig: Teubner, 1998), vol. X, fasc. 11, 1715–29; Albert Blaise, Lexicon Latinitatis Medii Aevi (Turnhout: Brepols, 1975), 679. 9. For a good account of these controversies see Jaroslav Pelikan, The Emergence of the Cath­ olic Tradition (100–600) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971). 10. Boethius, Contra Eutychen et Nestorium (De persona et duabus naturis) 4, in Theological Tractates and the Consolation of Philosophy, ed. and trans. H. F. Stewart, E. K. Rand, and S. J. Tester (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973), 92. 11. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae I, q. 29, art. 4, trans. English Dominican Fathers, 1920; online edition by Kevin Knight, 2017. https://www.newadvent.org/summa/1029.htm#article4. 12. G. L. Prestige, God in Patristic Thought (London: S.P.C.K., 1952), 282–301; Catherine Mowry LaCugna, God for Us: The Trinity and Christian Life (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), 270–78. 13. Emmanuel Durand, “Perichoresis: A Key Concept for Balancing Trinitarian Theology,” in Rethinking Trinitarian Theology: Disputed Questions and Contemporary Issues in Trinitarian Theology, ed. Giulio Maspero and Robert J. Wózniak (London: T and T Clark, 2012), 177–92. 14. I use the generic Man for convenience, but medieval (unlike biblical) texts also project these universals onto the corresponding feminine figures, Eve and Mary. Implicit in much exegesis, this Platonizing interpretation of Paul is developed most explicitly in Athanasius’s treatise On the Incarnation and Julian of Norwich’s Revelation of Love. 15. Ludwig Feuerbach, Gedanken über Tod und Unsterblichkeit, ed. Werner Schuffenhauer (Berlin: Akademie, 1981), in Ludwig Feuerbach: Gesammelte Werke, vol. 1, 257; trans. Karl  F. Morrison in “I Am You”: The Hermeneutics of Empathy in Western Literature, Theology, and Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 35. 16. On the divine motherhood of Mary, see Barbara Newman, “Indwelling: A Meditation on Empathy, Pregnancy, and the Virgin Mary,” in Studies on Medieval Empathies, ed. Karl  F. Morrison and Rudolph M. Bell (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013), 189–212. 17. Barbara Newman, “Charles Williams and the Companions of the Co-inherence,” Spiri­ tus 9 (2009): 1–26. 18. Charles Williams, The Descent of the Dove: A Short History of the Holy Spirit in the Church (1939; repr. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1974), 236. 19. Jean [John] Zizioulas, Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1985); Lane G. Tipton, “The Function of Perichoresis and the Divine Incomprehensibility,” Westminster Theological Journal 64 (2002): 289– 306; Emmanuel Durand, La périchorèse des personnes divines: Immanence mutuelle, réciprocité et communion (Paris: Cerf, 2005); Jürgen Moltmann, “God in the World—The World in God: Perichoresis in Trinity and Eschatology,” in The Gospel of John and Christian Theology, ed. Richard Bauckham and Carl Mosser (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008), 369–81. 20. Michael Battle, Reconciliation: The Ubuntu Theology of Desmond Tutu (Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 1997), and Ubuntu: I in You and You in Me (New York: Seabury, 2009). 21. Michael Onyebuchi Eze, Intellectual History in Contemporary South Africa (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 190–91.

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22. Battle, Ubuntu, 92. The comparison is Battle’s, though it risks a misreading of Descartes. In the phi losopher’s famous thought experiment, cogito ergo sum did not mean that his thinking was the cause of his existence; rather, his own certainty that he was thinking assured him that he in fact existed. 23. John S. Mbiti, African Religions and Philosophy [1969], 2nd ed. (Nairobi: Heinemann, 1990), 106. 24. Gabriel  M. Setiloane, African Theology: An Introduction (Johannesburg: Skotaville, 1986), 41. For more African analogues see Reiss, Mirages of the Selfe, 10–16, and Rufus Burrow Jr., Personalism: A Critical Introduction (St. Louis: Chalice Press, 1999), 249–51. 25. Barbara Newman, Medieval Crossover: Reading the Secular Against the Sacred (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013). 26. Mary  J. Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), and The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400–1200 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 27. Goswin of Bossut [Villers], Life of Arnulf 2.9, trans. Martinus Cawley, in Send Me God: The Lives of Ida the Compassionate of Nivelles, Nun of La Ramée, Arnulf, Lay Brother of Villers, and Abundus, Monk of Villers (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003), 171. 28. Friedrich Ohly, “Du bist mein, ich bin dein. Du in mir, ich in dir. Ich du, du ich,” in Kritische Bewahrung: Beiträge zur deutschen Philologie. Festschrift für Werner Schröder, ed. ErnstJoachim Schmidt (Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1974), 371–415. See also Morrison, “I Am You.” 29. Hilary Graham, “The Social Image of Pregnancy: Pregnancy as Spirit Possession,” Socio­ logical Review 24 (1976): 296. 30. Ibid., 298. 31. Marguerite Porete, Le mirouer des simples ames, c. 135, ed. Romana Guarnieri, CCCM 69 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1986).

Chapter 1. Teacher and Student 1. There have been several film and stage adaptations of James Hilton’s Goodbye, Mr. Chips (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1934). 2. Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1962), 16, 164. The story is better known from the 1969 film by Ronald Neame (20th Century Fox), starring Maggie Smith. 3. Dead Poets Society (Touchstone Pictures, 1989), directed by Peter Weir, written by Tom Schulman, starring Robin Williams. 4. Alan Bennett, The History Boys (London: Faber and Faber, 2004). The play premiered in London in 2004, directed by Nicholas Hytner. Bennett adapted his own play for a 2006 film version (BBC Two Films) with the same director, featuring the original cast. 5. The seven novels, beginning with Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (1997) and ending with Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (2007), were published by Bloomsbury in the United Kingdom and Scholastic Press in the United States. An eight-part film series (dividing the last novel into two films) was released by Warner Brothers between 2001 and 2011. 6. Affiliated at first with the cathedral school of Notre Dame, the university in Paris was officially chartered by Philip II in 1200 and recognized by Pope Innocent III in 1215. 7. C. Stephen Jaeger, Enchantment: On Charisma and the Sublime in the Arts of the West (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 138.

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8. George Howie, Educational Theory and Practice in St. Augustine (New York: Teachers College Press, 1969), 140. 9. Possidius of Calama, The Life of St. Augustine of Hippo, chap. 7, in The Western Fathers: Being the Lives of SS. Martin of Tours, Ambrose, Augustine of Hippo, Honoratus of Arles and Germanus of Auxerre, trans. F. R. Hoare (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1954), 202. 10. Ibid., chaps. 18 and 31, pp.  217, 243; Erika  T. Hermanowicz, Possidius of Calama: A Study of the North African Episcopate at the Time of Augustine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 2. 11. Augustine, Teaching Christianity, trans. Edmund Hill (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 1996). 12. Augustine, De catechizandis rudibus, ed. J.  B. Bauer, CCSL 46 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1969), 115–78; Instructing Beginners in Faith, trans. Raymond Canning, ed. Boniface Ramsey (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 2006). 13. John Immerwahr, “Augustine’s Advice for College Teachers: Ever Ancient, Ever New,” Metaphilosophy 39 (2008): 656–65. 14. Augustine, De catechizandis rudibus 12.17, ed. Bauer, 141; trans. Canning, 97–98. 15. Howie, Educational Theory and Practice, 151. 16. I borrow this phrase from Mia Münster-Swendsen, “Medieval ‘Virtuosity’: Classroom Practice and the Transfer of Charismatic Power in Medieval Scholarly Culture c. 1000–1230,” in Negotiating Heritage: Memories of the Middle Ages, ed. Mette  B. Bruun and Stephanie Glaser (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008), 51. 17. Augustine, De moribus ecclesiae catholicae 56 (PL 32:1333). 18. Augustine, De libero arbitrio 1.3 (PL 32:1223). 19. Augustine, De musica 1.4.6 (PL 32:1086); trans. Howie, Educational Theory and Prac­ tice, 139. 20. Augustine, De ordine 2.38 (PL 32:1013); trans. George Howie in St. Augustine: On Edu­ cation (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1969), 256. 21. Augustine, De doctrina christiana 4.59 (PL 34:118). 22. The formulation is C. Stephen Jaeger’s: The Envy of Angels: Cathedral Schools and Social Ideals in Medieval Europe, 950–1200 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), 49, 133–34, 208. 23. St. Benedict’s Rule for Monasteries, chap. 2, trans. Leonard J. Doyle (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1948), 8–10. 24. Ibid. chap. 64, pp. 89–91. 25. Ibid. chap. 6, p. 20. 26. Gregory the Great, Regula pastoralis/Règle pastorale, ed. Floribert Rommel, trans. Charles Morel, 2 vols., SC 381–82 (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1992); Pastoral Care, trans. Henry Davis (Westminster, MD: Newman Press, 1950). 27. Other significant resources included Cassiodorus and Isidore of Seville. See H. I. Marrou, A History of Education in Antiquity, trans. George Lamb (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1956); Texts and Transmission: A Survey of the Latin Classics, ed. L. D. Reynolds (Oxford: Clarendon, 1983); B. Munk Olsen, L’ étude des auteurs classiques latins aux XIe et XIIe siècles, 3 vols. (Paris: Éditions du Centre national de la recherche scientifique, 1982–87). 28. Jaeger, The Envy of Angels, 49–52. 29. Ibid., 107. 30. Richard Pulskamp and Daniel Otero, “Wibold’s Ludus Regularis, a 10th  Century Board Game,” in Convergence (June 2014), an online journal of the Mathematical Association of

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America: https://www.maa.org/press/periodicals/convergence/wibolds-ludus-regularis-a-10th-cen tury-board-game. 31. Aelfric, Colloquy on the Occupations, https://www.kul.pl/files/165/history%20of%20 english/texts2009/aelfriccolloquy-translation.pdf. Aelfric wrote the dialogue to teach Latin; an anonymous teacher supplied the glosses, which are used by students now to learn Old English. 32. Pierre Riché, Les écoles et l’enseignement dans l’Occident chrétien de la fin du Ve siècle au milieu du XIe siècle (Paris: Aubier Montaigne, 1979), 208–9. 33. Otloh of St. Emmeram, Visio 3, in Liber visionum (PL 146:352–53). On this episode see Dyan Elliott, The Corrupter of Boys: Sodomy, Scandal, and the Medieval Clergy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020), 147–48. 34. Caroline Walker Bynum, Docere verbo et exemplo: An Aspect of Twelfth­Century Spiritu­ ality (Missoula, MT: Scholars Press, 1979), and “The Spirituality of Regular Canons in the Twelfth Century,” in Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 22–58. 35. John of Fruttuaria, De ordine vitae et morum institutione 2.6 (PL 184:564). Cf. Ambrose, De officiis 1.71–74, ed. and trans. Ivor  J. Davidson, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 1:158–61. 36. John of Fruttuaria, De ordine vitae 2.9 (PL 184:566ab); Ambrose, De officiis 1.83–84, in Davidson, I:166. 37. John of Fruttuaria, De ordine vitae 3.10 (PL 184:566d–567a); Ambrose, De officiis 1.212 and 2.100, in Davidson, I:240, 324. 38. Adam of Perseigne, Letter 5.51 (De institutione novitiorum), in Lettres, vol. 1, ed. Jean Bouvet, SC 66 (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1960), 114; trans. Grace Perigo in The Letters of Adam of Perseigne (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1976), 101. 39. Ibid. 5.57, ed. Bouvet, 118; trans. Perigo, 104. 40. Wibald of Stavelot, Wibaldi epistolae 91, ed. Philipp Jaffé (1864; repr. Aalen: Scientia, 1967), 165; trans. Jaeger, The Envy of Angels, 80. 41. William of Conches, A Dialogue on Natural Philosophy (Dragmaticon philosophiae) 6.2.27, trans. Italo Ronca and Matthew Curr (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997), 173–74. 42. William of Conches, Dragmaticon philosophiae 6.27, ed. Italo Ronca, CCCM 152 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1997), 271; my translation. 43. John of Salisbury, The Metalogicon: A Twelfth­Century Defense of the Verbal and Logical Arts of the Trivium, bk. III, trans. Daniel D. McGarry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1955), 167. 44. John of Salisbury, Policraticus 7.14 (PL 199:670c). 45. Mayke de Jong, In Samuel’s Image: Child Oblation in the Early Medieval West (Leiden: Brill, 1996), 215–16; Mia Münster-Swendsen, “The Model of Scholastic Mastery in Northern Europe c. 970–1200,” in Teaching and Learning in Northern Europe, 1000–1200, ed. Sally N. Vaughn and Jay Rubenstein (Turnhout: Brepols, 2006), 316. 46. Münster-Swendsen, “Medieval ‘Virtuosity,’ ” 58. 47. “Learn every thing; you will see afterwards that nothing is superfluous. A skimpy knowledge is not a pleasing thing.” Hugh of St.  Victor, Didascalicon 6.3, trans. Jerome Taylor (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), 137. 48. Hugh of Saint-Victor, De institutione nouitiorum, in L’oeuvre de Hugues de Saint­Victor, 2 vols., ed. Hugh B. Feiss and Patrice Sicard, trans. Henri Rochais (Turnhout: Brepols, 1997), 1:7– 114. On manuscripts and influence see pp. 9–10; Jaeger, The Envy of Angels, 460–61; and Patrice

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Sicard, Iter Victorinum: La tradition manuscrite des oeuvres de Hugues et de Richard de Saint­ Victor (Turnhout: Brepols, 2015), 131–37. 49. For its range of meanings see H. I. Marrou, “ ‘Doctrina’ et ‘disciplina’ dans la langue des pères de l’Église,” Bulletin du Cange 9 (1934): 5–25. 50. Hugh of Saint-Victor, De institutione nouitiorum, 48. 51. Abelard’s former teacher and rival, William of Champeaux, was founding Saint-Victor at precisely the time Abelard himself was establishing his school at Sainte-Geneviève. It is no coincidence that Abelard’s ethics (shared by Heloise) pursue a sharply opposed emphasis on interiority and intentionality. Jaeger, The Envy of Angels, 233–34. 52. Hugh of Saint-Victor, De institutione nouitiorum, 68–70. Cf. Mia Münster-Swendsen, “The Use of Emotions in the North-European School Milieus, c. 1000–1200,” in Networks of Learning: Perspectives on Scholars in Byzantine East and Latin West, ca. 1000–1200, ed. Sita Steckel, Niels Gaul, and Michael Grünbart (Zurich: Lit, 2014), 167. 53. Hugh of Saint-Victor, De institutione nouitiorum, 74. 54. Ibid., 58; trans. Jaeger, The Envy of Angels, 261. 55. Godefroy de Saint-Victor, Fons philosophiae, vv. 757–76, ed. Pierre Michaud-Quantain (Namur: Éditions Godenne, 1956), 61–62. 56. Jaeger, The Envy of Angels, 76. 57. This specialized sense derives from the regularis disciplina, or system of punishments, laid out in the Benedictine Rule, chapters 25–28. Marrou, “ ‘Doctrina’ et ‘disciplina,’ ” 24–25. 58. For a broader history of flagellation see Niklaus Largier, In Praise of the Whip: A Cul­ tural History of Arousal (New York: Zone, 2007). 59. Liber ordinis Sancti Victoris Parisiensis, c. 33, ed. Luc Jocqué and Ludo Milis, CCCM 61 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1984), 160. 60. This image is first recorded in Plato’s Theaetetus 191d–e, though Plato ascribes it to Homer. Medieval writers knew it from any number of sources, including Aristotle’s De memoria and its commentaries, Cicero’s De oratore, the pseudo-Ciceronian Rhetorica ad Herennium, Quintilian, Augustine, and Martianus Capella. Mary  J. Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 21–22. 61. Hugh of Saint-Victor, De institutione nouitiorum, 40. 62. Ibid., 42. 63. C. Stephen Jaeger, “Humanism and Ethics at the School of St.  Victor in the Early Twelfth Century,” Mediaeval Studies 55 (1993): 78. 64. Jaeger, The Envy of Angels, 106. 65. Hugh of Fouilloy, De claustro animae 2.16 (PL 176:1067–68). 66. On scurrilous teacher-student dialogues see Münster-Swendsen, “The Use of Emotions.” 67. Introduction to The Letters and Poems of Fulbert of Chartres, ed. and trans. Frederick Behrens (Oxford: Clarendon, 1976), xvi–xviii. 68. For a good account of the issues at stake see R. W. Southern, Saint Anselm: A Portrait in a Landscape (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 44–50. 69. Jaeger, The Envy of Angels, 81–82; Münster-Swendsen, “The Model of Scholastic Mastery,” 322. 70. Adelmann to Berengar, Epistola de Eucharistae sacramento (PL 143:1289ab); Appendix 5  in Loren MacKinney, Bishop Fulbert and Education at the School of Chartres (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1957), 53–54. 71. Brian Patrick McGuire, Friendship and Community: The Monastic Experience, 350–1250, rev. ed. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010), 163–73.

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72. “Adelman’s Poem Concerning Fulbert and His Deceased Disciples,” in MacKinney, Bishop Fulbert, 49; my translation. 73. Riché, Les écoles et l’enseignement, 196–97. 74. Horace, Ars poetica 139; Jaeger, The Envy of Angels, 180. 75. Guitmund of Aversa, De corporis et sanguinis Christi veritate in Eucharistia (PL 149:1428ab). 76. “Adelman’s Poem Concerning Fulbert,” stanza 9, in MacKinney, Fulbert of Chartres, 50. 77. The Letters and Poems of Fulbert of Chartres, no. 88, ed. and trans. Behrends, 158–59. 78. Ibid., no. 95, pp. 172–74; my translation. 79. Ibid., no. 114, p. 205. 80. MacKinney, Bishop Fulbert, 39–40. 81. Jaeger, The Envy of Angels, 221, 354. 82. Gozechin of Mainz, Gozechini Epistola ad Walcherum, in Apologiae duae: Gozechini epistola ad Walcherum; Burchardi . . . apologia de barbis, ed. R. B. C. Huygens, CCCM 62 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1985), 11–43; trans. Jaeger in The Envy of Angels, 349–75. 83. Jeffrey Burton Russell, Dissent and Reform in the Early Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1965), 164; Huygens, Apologiae duae, 4. 84. Gozechini Epistola, 11; Jaeger, The Envy of Angels, 349–50. 85. Ibid. 12; Jaeger, 350. 86. Ibid. 12; Jaeger, 350. 87. Ibid. 12–13; Jaeger, 351. 88. Ibid. 17; Jaeger, 354. 89. Münster-Swendsen, “Medieval ‘Virtuosity,’ ” 62. 90. Gozechini Epistola, 30–31; my translation. 91. Ibid. 32; Jaeger, 365–66. 92. Ibid. 34; Jaeger, 367. 93. Jaeger, The Envy of Angels, 222–26. 94. Southern, Saint Anselm, 14. 95. Eadmer of Canterbury, Vita S. Anselmi 2.14, ed. and trans. R. W. Southern, The Life of St Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1962), 82. 96. Rumor has it that when Rowan Williams was first proposed as a candidate for archbishop of Canterbury, an opponent told the prime minister, “Rowan Williams is a scholar, a theologian, and a mystic. He must never be archbishop of Canterbury!” St. Anselm possessed the same credentials and similar drawbacks. 97. Sally N. Vaughn, “Anselm of Bec: The Pattern of His Teaching,” in Teaching and Learn­ ing in Northern Europe, 1000–1200, ed. Sally N. Vaughn and Jay Rubenstein (Turnhout: Brepols, 2006), 99; Priscilla  D. Watkins, “Lanfranc at Caen: Teaching by Example,” in Teaching and Learning, 70–97. 98. Southern, Saint Anselm, 68. 99. Ep. 20 in Anselm, Opera omnia, ed. F. S. Schmitt, 6 vols. (Edinburgh: T. Nelson, 1946), 3:127; The Letters of Saint Anselm of Canterbury, trans. Walter Fröhlich, 3 vols. (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1990–94), 1:111. 100. Anselm, Ep. 64 in Opera omnia, 3:180; trans. Fröhlich, 1:180. Cf. Epistle 290, in which Anselm encourages his nephew to work hard at grammar and prose composition, but still more to maintain good mores. 101. Eadmer, Vita S. Anselmi 1.11, pp. 20–21. 102. Ibid. 1.22, pp. 37–38.

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103. Ibid. 1.10, pp. 16–20. 104. Anselm, Ep. 4 in Opera omnia, 3:105; trans. Fröhlich, 1:82. 105. Eadmer, Vita S. Anselmi 1.10, p. 20. 106. Cf. Brian Patrick McGuire: “Anselm had one great love in his life, the young monk Osbern at Bec,” whose “death when Anselm was prior there was a terrible blow for him.” Friend­ ship and Community, 211. 107. Anselm, Ep. 60 in Opera omnia, 3:175; trans. Fröhlich, 1:173. 108. Guibert of Nogent, De vita sua 1.17 (PL 156:874bc), trans. Paul  J. Archambault, A Monk’s Confession: The Memoirs of Guibert of Nogent (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996), 60–61. 109. Southern, Saint Anselm, 376–80. On Honorius’s life and works see Valerie I. J. Flint, Honorius Augustodunensis of Regensburg (Aldershot: Variorum, 1995). 110. Liber Anselmi Archiepiscopi de humanis moribus per similitudines, ed. R. W. Southern and F. S. Schmitt, in Memorials of St. Anselm (London: British Academy, 1969), 37–104. 111. Southern, Saint Anselm, 382. 112. Eadmer, Vita S. Anselmi 2.8, p. 70. Bestiaries often depict the owl being mobbed and pecked by a host of smaller birds. 113. Ibid. 1.13, p. 23. 114. Ibid. 2.33, p. 111. 115. Ibid. 2.72, p. 150. 116. Southern, Saint Anselm, 452. 117. Bernard of Clairvaux, Ep. 250, in Sancti Bernardi Opera, ed. Jean Leclercq, C. H. Talbot, and Henri Rochais, 8 vols. (Rome: Editiones cistercienses, 1957–77), 8:147. See John R. Sommerfeldt, Bernard of Clairvaux on the Spirituality of Relationship (New York: Newman Press, 2004), 114–23. 118. Anselm, De similitudinibus 101–8, in Memorials of St. Anselm, 81. 119. Augustine, Confessions 4.16, ed. Joseph Bernhart (Munich: Kösel, 1966), 180; trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin (London: Penguin, 1961), 87–89. 120. Ibid. 5.3, ed. Bernhart, 192–94; trans. Pine-Coffin, 92. 121. Ibid. 5.6, ed. Bernhart, 206–8; trans. Pine-Coffin, 98. No works by Faustus survive; his teaching is known chiefly from Augustine’s rebuttal, Contra Faustum. 122. Augustine, Confessions 5.13, ed. Bernhart, 234; trans. Pine-Coffin, 107. 123. Peter Abelard, Historia calamitatum 10, trans. Betty Radice, in The Letter Collection of Peter Abelard and Heloise, ed. David Luscombe (Oxford: Clarendon, 2013), 14–17. 124. Scholars today give Anselm of Laon considerably more credit. See Cédric Giraud, Per verba magistri: Anselme de Laon et son école au XIIe siècle (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010); Marcia L. Colish, “Another Look at the School of Laon,” Archives d’ histoire doctrinale et littéraire du Moyen Âge 53 (1986): 7–22. 125. Vita Goswini Aquicinctensis, ed. M. Boquet, Recueil des historiens des Gaules et de la France (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1806), 14:443; trans. Münster-Swendsen, “Model of Scholastic Mastery,” 331. Goswin of Anchin is not to be confused with Goswin of Mainz. 126. Jaeger, The Envy of Angels, 229–36. 127. Abelard, Carmen ad Astralabium, vv. 7–12, ed. Juanita Feros Ruys, in The Repentant Abelard: Family, Gender, and Ethics in Peter Abelard’s Carmen ad Astralabium and Planctus (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 93–94; my translation. 128. Augustine, De quantitate animae 41 (PL 32:1059).

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129. Bryan R. Warnick, Imitation and Education: A Philosophical Inquiry into Learning by Example (Albany: SUNY Press, 2008), 108. Nevertheless, Warnick notes that critical thinking itself is learned by imitating exemplars, as Plato discovered by listening to Socrates. 130. Guibert of Nogent, De vita sua 1.5 (PL 156:845c), trans. Archambault, A Monk’s Confes­ sion, 17. 131. Ibid. 1.6 (PL 156:847ab); trans. Archambault, 19. 132. John F. Benton offers some psychoanalysis of Guibert in the introduction to his translation, Self and Society in Medieval France: The Memoirs of Abbot Guibert of Nogent (New York: Harper and Row, 1970). 133. John of Salisbury, Policraticus, bk. 2, trans. Joseph B. Pike, Frivolities of Courtiers and Footprints of Philosophers (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1938), 147. 134. Richard Kieckhefer, Magic in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1989); see pp. 151–52 on John of Salisbury. 135. Münster-Swendsen, “The Model of Scholastic Mastery,” 328. 136. Jaeger, The Envy of Angels, 316. 137. Elliott, The Corrupter of Boys, 189–210. 138. Michael Hone, Boarding School Homosexuality: From Plato’s Academy to the Princeton Rub (N.p.: CreateSpace, 2016). This sensational book (like most of its kind) completely ignores the Middle Ages. 139. Marc Fisher, “The Master,” New Yorker (1 April  2013), http://www.newyorker.com /magazine/2013/04/01/the-master-2. 140. Amos Kamil and Sean Elder, Great Is the Truth: Secrecy, Scandal, and the Quest for Justice at the Horace Mann School (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015); Stephen Fife, The Thirteenth Boy: A Memoir of Education and Abuse (Seattle: Cune Press, 2015). According to Fife, the teacher in question boasted that he had driven twelve former pupils to suicide, a charge the teacher denies. 141. Münster-Swendsen, “Medieval ‘Virtuosity,’ ” 63. Cf. Dyan Elliott, “Violence Against the Dead: The Negative Translation and damnatio memoriae in the Middle Ages,” Speculum 92 (2017): 1020–55. 142. Peter Damian, Book of Gomorrah: An Eleventh­Century Treatise Against Clerical Ho­ mosexual Practices, trans. Pierre J. Payer (Waterloo, Ont.: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1982). See Mark D. Jordan, The Invention of Sodomy in Christian Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 45–66; Larry Scanlon, “Unmanned Men and Eunuchs of God: Peter Damian’s Liber Gomorrhianus and the Sexual Politics of Papal Reform,” New Medieval Literatures 2 (1998): 37–64; William Burgwinkle, “Visible and Invisible Bodies and Subjects in Peter Damian,” in Troubled Vision: Gender, Sexuality, and Sight in Medieval Text and Image, ed. Emma Campbell and Robert Mills (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 47–62; Elliott, The Cor­ rupter of Boys, 65–69. 143. Book of Gomorrah, chap. 6, trans. Payer, 41–42. 144. Leo IX did decree that three types of “sodomites” were to be permanently defrocked even after penance: those who had sinned “for a long time,” even by solitary masturbation; those who had sinned interfemorally “with many men even for a short time”; and those who had committed anal penetration even once. For a translation of his reply to Damian, Nos humanius agen­ tes (1051), see John Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 365–66.

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145. Damian, Liber Gomorrhianus, chap. 15 (PL 145:174d–175a), trans. Payer, Book of Gomor­ rah, 61; abridged from the Regula monachorum of Fructuosus of Braga, chap. 16 (PL 87:1107ab). 146. Peter the Venerable, De miraculis 1.14 (PL 189:878a). 147. Ilene H. Forsyth, “The Ganymede Capital at Vézelay,” Gesta 15 (1976): 241–46; Patricia A. Quinn, Better Than the Sons of Kings: Boys and Monks in the Early Middle Ages (New York: Peter Lang, 1989), 185–87. 148. The best study in English is Gerald A. Bond, The Loving Subject: Desire, Eloquence, and Power in Romanesque France (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995). 149. Carol Dana Lanham, “Freshman Composition in the Early Middle Ages: Epistolography and Rhetoric Before the Ars Dictaminis,” Viator 23 (1992): 115–34; Marjorie Curry Woods, “Weeping for Dido: Epilogue on a Premodern Rhetorical Exercise in the Postmodern Classroom,” in Latin Grammar and Rhetoric: From Classical Theory to Medieval Practice, ed. Carol Dana Lanham (London: Continuum, 2002), 284–94. 150. On coeducation and courtly love, see C. Stephen Jaeger, Ennobling Love: In Search of a Lost Sensibility (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 84–106; Barbara Newman, Making Love in the Twelfth Century: “Letters of Two Lovers” in Context (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016). The latter includes translations of both exchanges just mentioned, the Tegernsee love letters and the Regensburg Songs. See also Die Tegernseer Brief­ sammlung des 12. Jahrhunderts, ed. Helmut Plechl and Werner Bergmann, MGH Briefe der deutschen Kaiserzeit 8:343–66 (Hannover: Hahnsche Buchhandlung, 2002), and Carmina Ratisponensia, ed. Anke Paravicini (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1979). 151. For an early thirteenth-century example of coeducation in the Netherlandish town of Zoutleeuw, see The Life of Beatrice of Nazareth 1.21, ed. Léonce Reypens, trans. Roger De Ganck (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1991), 26–27. 152. Thomas Stehling, “To Love a Medieval Boy,” Journal of Homosexuality 8, nos. 3–4 (1983): 156. 153. The same qualities are ascribed to the courtly domna of the troubadours, but they do not appear in Latin heterosexual songs, such as those of the Carmina burana. Ibid., 160. 154. Marbod of Rennes, “Satyra in amatorem puelli sub assumpta persona,” Carmina varia (PL 171: 1718ab), trans. Stehling, 161 (lightly altered). 155. From “O admirabile Veneris idolum,” ed. Frederick Brittain, in The Medieval Latin and Romance Lyric to a.d. 1300 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1951), 89. Sung to the tune of “O Roma nobilis,” the song is characterized by its editor as “a clerk’s lament on the abduction of a favourite acolyte.” The jactis lapidibus refer to the myth of Deucalion and Pyrrha, who like Noah and his wife survived the Flood in an ark. After it they repopulated the world by throwing stones over their shoulders; these were transformed into men and women. 156. Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, 243–66; Medieval Latin Poems of Male Love and Friendship, ed. and trans. Thomas Stehling (New York: Garland, 1984). 157. Carissa M. Harris, Obscene Pedagogies: Transgressive Talk and Sexual Education in Late Medieval Britain (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2018), 103–49. 158. Tina Chronopoulos, “Ganymede in the Medieval Classroom: Reading an Ode by the Roman Poet Horace,” Medium Aevum 86 (2017): 224–48. See also Elliott, The Corrupter of Boys, 86–88. 159. Richard de Bury, Philobiblon, c. 1, ed. Pino di Branco (Milan: La Vita Felice, 1998), 52–56. 160. Ibid., c. 4, p. 74. 161. Carruthers, The Book of Memory, 171–74. 162. Ibid., 168.

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163. Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, 1.1.36. http://www.thelatinlibrary.com/quintilian/quintilian .institutio1.shtml#1. 164. Stephen M. Wheeler, ed. and trans., Accessus ad Auctores: Medieval Introductions to the Authors (Codex latinus monacensis 19475) (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute, 2015), 2. These categories derive from the introduction to Boethius’s commentary on Porphyry’s Isagoge. See A. J. Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship: Scholastic Literary Attitudes in the Later Middle Ages, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988), 9–39. 165. Fabius Planciades Fulgentius, Commento all’Eneide [Expositio Virgilianae continen­ tiae . . . moralis], ed. and trans. Fabio Rosa (Milan: Luni, 1997). 166. Wheeler, Accessus ad Auctores, 27. 167. Ibid., 88–89. 168. Ovide moralisé, bk. 10, vv. 3750–3800, ed. C. de Boer, 5 vols. (Amsterdam: J. Müller, 1915–38), 4:100–101. 169. Jaeger, Enchantment, 160. 170. Edward Slingerland, Trying Not to Try: Ancient China, Modern Science, and the Power of Spontaneity (New York: Broadway Books, 2014), 40–41. 171. Ibid., 8. Other schools of classical Chinese philosophy (notably the Daoists) agree on the importance of attaining wu­wei and de, but they disagree with the Confucian program of rigorous cultivation on the grounds that such discipline will never produce real spontaneity. 172. Brigitte Bedos-Rezak, When Ego Was Imago: Signs of Identity in the Middle Ages (Leiden: Brill, 2010). 173. Colin Morris, The Discovery of the Individual, 1050–1200 (New York: Harper and Row, 1972); Bynum, “Did the Twelfth Century Discover the Individual?” in Jesus as Mother, 82–109. 174. Jaeger, The Envy of Angels, 7. 175. Wibald of Stavelot, Wibaldi epistolae 167, ed. Jaffé, 286; trans. Jaeger, The Envy of An­ gels, 80. 176. Watkins, “Lanfranc at Caen: Teaching by Example”; Vaughn, “Anselm of Bec: The Pattern of His Teaching.”

Chapter 2. Saint and Sinner 1. T. M. Luhrmann, When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Rela­ tionship with God (New York: Knopf, 2012), xxii. 2. I develop this parallel further in “Lessons from the Vineyard: On the Pedagogy of Prayer,” Franciscan Studies 72 (2014): 453–64. 3. Barbara Newman, “Possessed by the Spirit: Devout Women, Demoniacs, and the Apostolic Life in the Thirteenth Century,” Speculum 73 (1998): 733–70. 4. Martha G. Newman, “Crucified by the Virtues: Monks, Lay Brothers, and Women in Thirteenth-Century Cistercian Saints’ Lives,” in Gender and Difference in the Middle Ages, ed. Sharon Farmer and Carol Braun Pasternack (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 182–209. 5. Paul C. Dilley, Monasteries and the Care of Souls in Late Antique Christianity: Cognition and Discipline (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 161–63, 167–68. 6. C. Grant Loomis, White Magic: An Introduction to the Folklore of Christian Legend (Cambridge, MA: Mediaeval Academy of Amer ica, 1948), 72–73. On Godric see Barbara

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Newman, “Visions,” in High Medieval Literary Cultures in England (ca. 1066–1300), ed. Elizabeth Tyler and Jocelyn Wogan-Browne (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming). 7. Simone Roisin, L’ hagiographie cistercienne dans le diocèse de Liège au XIIIe siècle (Louvain: Bibliothèque de l’université, 1947); New Trends in Feminine Spirituality: The Holy Women of Liège and Their Impact, ed. Juliette Dor, Lesley Johnson, and Jocelyn Wogan-Browne (Turnhout: Brepols, 1999); Walter Simons, Cities of Ladies: Beguine Communities in the Medieval Low Countries, 1200–1565 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001); Anneke B. MulderBakker, Lives of the Anchoresses: The Rise of the Urban Recluse in Medieval Europe, trans. Myra Heerspink Scholz (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005). 8. Jacques de Vitry, Vita  B. Mariae Oigniacensis, ed. D. Papebroeck, AASS Jun., vol. 5 (Paris: Palmé, 1867), 542–72; The Life of Mary of Oignies, trans. Margot  H. King, in Mary of Oignies: Mother of Salvation, ed. Anneke B. Mulder-Bakker (Turnhout: Brepols, 2006), 33–127. 9. Jacques de Vitry, Historia Occidentalis, ed. John Frederick Hinnebusch (Fribourg: University Press, 1972); Historia Orientalis, ed. and trans. Jean Donnadieu (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008); Sermones vulgares vel ad status, ed. Jean Longère, CCCM 255 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013–); Lettres de Jacques de Vitry, ed. R. B. C. Huygens (Leiden: Brill, 1960). 10. Thomas of Cantimpré, Vita B. Mariae Oigniacensis. Supplementum, ed. Arnold Raysse, AASS Jun., vol. 5 (Paris: Palmé, 1867), 572–81; “The Supplement to James of Vitry’s Life of Mary of Oignies,” trans. Hugh Feiss, in Mary of Oignies, 129–65. 11. Thomas of Cantimpré, Liber de natura rerum, ed. Helmut Boese (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1973); Bonum universale de apibus, ed. Georges Colvénère (Douai: Beller, 1627); Les exemples du “Livre des Abeilles”: Une vision médiévale, trans. Henri Platelle (Turnhout: Brepols, 1997). 12. Rachel  J.  D. Smith, Excessive Saints: Gender, Narrative, and Theological Invention in Thomas of Cantimpré’s Mystical Hagiographies (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018). 13. Thomas of Cantimpré, Vita  S. Christinae Mirabilis Trudonopoli, ed. J. Pinius, AASS Jul., vol. 5 (Paris: Palmé, 1868), 637–60; The Life of Christina the Astonishing, trans. Margot H. King and Barbara Newman, in Thomas of Cantimpré: The Collected Saints’ Lives, ed. Barbara Newman (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008), 123–57. 14. On this debated topic see Newman, “Possessed by the Spirit,” 763–68; Amy Hollywood, Sensible Ecstasy: Mysticism, Sexual Difference, and the Demands of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 241–47; and Newman, Thomas of Cantimpré, 30–37. 15. Thomas of Cantimpré, Vita Margarete de Ypris, ed. G. G. Meersseman, in “Les Frères Prêcheurs et le mouvement dévot en Flandre au XIIIe siècle,” Archivum Fratrum Praedicatorum 18 (1948): 106–30; The Life of Margaret of Ypres, trans. Margot H. King and Barbara Newman, in Thomas of Cantimpré, 159–206. 16. Thomas of Cantimpré, Vita S. Lutgardis Aquiriensis, ed. G. Henschen, AASS Jun., vol. 4 (Paris: Palmé, 1867), 187–210; The Life of Lutgard of Aywières, trans. Margot H. King and Barbara Newman, in Thomas of Cantimpré, 207–96. 17. I refer to this writer as Goswin of Villers after the monastery where he spent his life, but he is often called Goswin of Bossut after his native village. See Jessica Barr, “Rhetorics of Wonder in Three Lives by Goswin of Bossut,” Cistercian Studies Quarterly 55 (2020): 177–99. 18. Roisin, L’efflorescence cistercienne, 23–46; Ursmer Berlière et al., Monasticon belge, vol. 4, pt. 2, Province de Brabant (Liège: Centre national de recherches d’histoire religieuse, 1968), 341– 405; Ernest W. McDonnell, The Beguines and Beghards in Medieval Culture, with Special Em­ phasis on the Belgian Scene (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1954), 112–19, 170–79. 19. Vita B. Idae de Nivella, ed. Chrysostomos Henriquez, Quinque prudentes virgines (Antwerp: Cnobbaert, 1630), 199–297; The Life of Ida of Nivelles, trans. Martinus Cawley, in Send Me

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God: The Lives of Ida the Compassionate of Nivelles, Nun of La Ramée, Arnulf, Lay Brother of Villers, and Abundus, Monk of Villers, by Goswin of Bossut (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003), 27–120. Cawley used the version in Brussels, Bibliothèque royale, MS 8895–96, fols. 1–35v, because the Henriquez edition is bowdlerized. 20. Goswin of Bossut, Vita Abundi, ed. A. M. Frenken, “De Vita van Abundus van Hoei,” Cîteaux 10 (1959): 5–33; The Life of Abundus, Monk of Villers, trans. Martinus Cawley, in Send Me God, 207–58. 21. Goswin of Bossut, Vita  B. Arnulfi Villariensis, ed. D. Papebroeck, AASS Jun., vol. 7 (Paris: Palmé, 1867), 556–79; The Life of Arnulf, Lay Brother of Villers, trans. Martinus Cawley, in Send Me God, 123–205. 22. Vita fratris Simonis de Alna, Brussels, Royal Library of Belgium, MS 8965–66. I thank Jeroen Deploige for sharing his transcription of this manuscript, copied by a Jesuit in 1637 from a lost thirteenth-century original. We are preparing an edition and translation for Analecta Bollandiana. 23. Caesarius of Heisterbach, “Narratio longa et utilis de Simone converso de Alna eiusque prophetiis,” Dialogus miraculorum III.33, ed. Joseph Strange, 2 vols. (Cologne: J.  M. Heberle, 1851), 1:150–55. 24. Jacques de Vitry, Historia Occidentalis, ed. Hinnebusch, 115; Jeroen Deploige, “How Gendered Was Clairvoyance in the Thirteenth Century? The Case of Simon of Aulne,” in Speak­ ing to the Eye: Sight and Insight through Text and Image (1150–1650), ed. Thérèse de Hemptinne, Veerle Fraeters, and María Eugenia Góngora (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013), 112. 25. Albericus Trium-fontium, Chronica, ed. Paulus Scheffer-Boichorst, MGH.SS. 23 (Hannover: Hahn, 1874), 916. 26. Vitae  B. Odiliae Viduae Leodiensis Libri Duo Priores, II.3, Analecta Bollandiana 13 (1894), 256–57. 27. La vie du bienheureux Frère Simon, convers à l’Abbaye d’Aulne, tirée des manuscrits an­ ciens du Monastère, ed. le Baron de Dorlodot (Tournai: Desclée, 1968); Deploige, “How Gendered Was Clairvoyance?” 95–126. 28. Hugh of Floreffe, Vita  B. Juettae reclusae, ed. G. Henschen, AASS Jan., vol. 2 (Paris: Palmé, 1863), 145–69; The Life of Yvette, Anchoress of Huy, trans. Jo Ann McNamara, in Living Saints of the Thirteenth Century, ed. Anneke B. Mulder-Bakker (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011), 47–141. 29. Walter Simons, “Reading a Saint’s Body: Rapture and Bodily Movement in the Vitae of Thirteenth-Century Beguines,” in Framing Medieval Bodies, ed. Sarah Kay and Miri Rubin (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), 10–23; Joanna E. Ziegler, “On the Artistic Nature of Elisabeth of Spalbeek’s Ecstasy: The Southern Low Countries Do Matter,” in The Texture of Society: Medieval Women in the Southern Low Countries, ed. Ellen Kittell and Mary Suydam (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 181–202; Jesse Njus, “The Politics of Mysticism: Elisabeth of Spalbeek in Context,” Church History 77 (2008): 285–317; eadem, “What Did It Mean to Act in the Middle Ages? Elisabeth of Spalbeek and Imitatio Christi,” Theatre Journal 63 (2011): 1–21. 30. Philip of Clairvaux, Vita Elizabeth sanctimonialis in Erkenrode, ed. Bollandists, Cata­ logus codicum hagiographicorum Bibliothecae Regiae Bruxellensis, vol. 1, pt. 1 (Brussels: Polleunis, 1886), 362–78. 31. Sean L. Field, Courting Sanctity: Holy Women and the Capetians (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019), 83–116. 32. Vita B. Julianae, ed. G. Henschen and D. Papebroeck, AASS Apr., vol. 1 (Paris: Palmé, 1866), 435–75; The Life of Juliana of Cornillon, trans. Barbara Newman, in Living Saints of the Thirteenth Century, 143–302. Also called St. Juliana of Liège, she should not be confused with the martyr St. Juliana of Nicomedia (d. 304) or the Italian St. Juliana Falconieri (d. 1341).

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33. Vita Beatricis: De autobiografie van de Z. Beatrijs van Tienen, ed. Léonce Reypens (Antwerp: Ruusbroec, 1964), repr. with an English translation in Roger De Ganck, The Life of Beatrice of Nazareth, 1200–1268 (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1991). 34. Beatrice of Nazareth, Seven Manieren van Minne, ed. Léonce Reypens and Jozef Van Mierlo (Leuven: S.V. de Vlaamsche Boekenhalle, 1926); “ There Are Seven Manners of Loving,” trans. Eric Colledge, in Medieval Women’s Visionary Literature, ed. Elizabeth Alvilda Petroff (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 200–206; Life of Beatrice, 288–331. For a revealing comparison of Beatrice’s vernacular text with the hagiographer’s Latin adaptation, see Amy Hollywood, The Soul as Virgin Wife: Mechthild of Magdeburg, Marguerite Porete, and Meister Eck­ hart (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995), 29–39. 35. Vita B. Idae Lewensis, ed. Remigius de Buck, AASS Oct., vol. 13 (Paris: Palmé, 1883), 100–135; Ida the Gentle of Léau [Gorsleeuw], trans. Martinus Cawley (Lafayette, OR: Guadalupe Translations, 1998). 36. Vita Ven. Idae Lovaniensis, ed. D. Papebroeck, AASS Apr., vol. 2 (Paris: Palmé, 1866), 156–89; Ida the Eager of Louvain, trans. Martinus Cawley (Lafayette, OR: Guadalupe Translations, 2000). 37. Cawley, introduction to Ida the Gentle, xiii. 38. Cawley, introduction to Ida the Eager, ix–x. 39. I have found no examples in the Lives of the Augustinian abbot John of Cantimpré, who died before Fourth Lateran; Gobert of Aspremont, a crusader who became a lay brother at Villers; the nun Alice of Schaerbeek, whose seclusion as a leper minimized human contact; or Lame Margaret of Magdeburg, a recluse, whose so-called Vita is a compendium of mystical doctrine rather than a biography. 40. Gregory I, Homiliae in Hiezechihelem Prophetam I.1–3, ed. Marcus Adriaen, CCSL 142 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1971), 5–7. 41. Life of Juliana 1.21, in Living Saints, 208–9. For important scholastic discussions of prophecy in Juliana’s milieu, see Mulder-Bakker, Lives of the Anchoresses, 93–100. 42. Life of Mary of Oignies, prol. 6, in Mary of Oignies, 45. This woman might have been Lutgard, Christina Mirabilis, Yvette of Huy, or some unknown figure. 43. Life of Christina 29, in Thomas of Cantimpré, 143. 44. Life of Yvette 87, in Living Saints, 121. In citations from this Life I have used the paragraph rather than the chapter numbers. 45. Life of Arnulf 2.1, in Send Me God, 154. 46. Life of Ida of Nivelles 30, in Send Me God, 85. 47. Life of Abundus 9, in Send Me God, 224. 48. Vita Simonis, par. 18, fol. 215r. 49. Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 117, 141, 228–29. Marie d’Oignies, Juliana, and Ida of Leuven could all tell when a consecrated host was present or detect a fake one. 50. Caesarius, Dialogus miraculorum III.33, pp. 151–52. 51. Life of Mary 2.80, in Mary of Oignies, 105. 52. Ibid. 2.79, pp. 104–5. 53. Life of Lutgard 2.3, in Thomas of Cantimpré, 241. 54. Life of Ida of Nivelles 12, in Send Me God, 49. 55. Ida the Gentle 29a, p. 29. 56. Life of Arnulf 2.13, in Send Me God, 178–79.

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57. Ibid. 2.11, pp. 175–76. 58. Vita Simonis 22, fol. 216r, and 26, fol. 217r. 59. Caesarius, Dialogus miraculorum III.33, pp. 150–51. 60. Ibid., p. 151. 61. Summa: Robert Courson on Penance, ed. V. L. Kennedy, Mediaeval Studies 7 (1945), 305. Such concessions violate the letter of “Omnis utriusque sexus,” which specifies that the penitent should make his confession solus. 62. Caesarius, Dialogus miraculorum III.33, p. 155. 63. Alexander Murray, “Counselling in Medieval Confession,” in Handling Sin: Confession in the Middle Ages, ed. Peter Biller and A. J. Minnis (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell and Brewer/ York Medieval Press, 1998), 70. 64. Ibid., 66–67; Fourth Lateran, canon 21, “Omnis utriusque sexus,” in Enchiridion sym­ bolorum, definitionum et declarationum de rebus fidei et morum, ed. Heinrich Denzinger and Adolf Schönmetzer, 33rd ed. (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 1965), 264–65. The canon specifies that a penitent wishing to confess to another priest should first obtain permission from his own priest, or else his absolution will be invalid. That provision was widely ignored. 65. Mulder-Bakker, Lives of the Anchoresses, 13, 76–77. 66. Ibid., 69–70. 67. Life of Yvette 105, in Living Saints, 130. 68. Ibid. 81–82, p. 119. For cautionary tales on this sin see Dyan Elliott, “Sex in Holy Places: An Exploration of a Medieval Anxiety,” Journal of Women’s History 6 (1994): 6–34. 69. Life of Yvette 91–94, in Living Saints, 123–25. 70. John W. Coakley, Women, Men, and Spiritual Power: Female Saints and Their Male Collaborators (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006). 71. Life of Yvette 83–84, in Living Saints, 120. 72. Ibid. 102, p. 129. 73. Ibid. 96, pp. 125–26. 74. Ida the Eager 2.15, pp. 60–61. 75. Vita Simonis 12, fol. 213r. 76. Ibid. 29, fol. 218r. 77. Ibid. 15–17, fols. 213v–14v. 78. Philip of Clairvaux, Vita Elizabeth 25, p. 376. 79. Life of Christina 43, in Thomas of Cantimpré, 149. 80. Ibid. 44–45, pp. 149–50. 81. Njus, “The Politics of Mysticism,” 310–16. Conversely, Nancy Caciola represents Elisabeth as “weak, vain, and manipulable”: Discerning Spirits: Divine and Demonic Possession in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), 122. Sean Field argues that Elizabeth’s “self-censorship” may have saved her life from serious danger: Courting Sanctity, 114. For the tangled primary sources see Sean L. Field and Walter Simons, “A Prophecy Fulfilled? An Annotated Translation of the Sources on the Death of Crown Prince Louis of France (1276) and the Interrogations of Elizabeth of Spalbeek (1276–1278),” Medieval Low Countries 5 (2018): 35–91. 82. Life of Margaret 29, in Thomas of Cantimpré, 189. 83. Ibid., p. 190. 84. Ibid. 54, pp. 204–5; Newman, introduction to Thomas of Cantimpré, 42; Simons, Cities of Ladies, 98–99, 105, 113. 85. “Deus, cui omne cor patet, et omnis voluntas loquitur, et quem nullum latet secretum.” Alcuin, “Missa de gratia sancti Spiritus postulanda,” Liber sacramentorum 1 (PL101:446b).

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Known as the Collect for Purity, this prayer appears in the Leofric Missal, the Sarum Missal, and many later ser vice books, including the Book of Common Prayer. 86. Newman, “Possessed by the Spirit.” 87. Dyan Elliott, Fallen Bodies: Pollution, Sexuality, and Demonology in the Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 14–34. 88. Caesarius of Heisterbach, Die Fragmente der Libri VIII Miraculorum 1.25, ed. Aloys Meister (Rome: Herder, 1901), 38. 89. Ibid. 1.26, p. 39. 90. Ibid. 1.27, p. 40. 91. Caesarius, Dialogus miraculorum III.2, p. 112. 92. Pope Clement VI granted an indulgence to all who died of the plague and allowed even women to hear confessions: Joseph P. Byrne, Encyclopedia of the Black Death (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-Clio, 2012), 41. On 10 January 1349, the bishop of Bath and Wells ordered his clergy to publicize the validity of emergency confessions to laymen: The Black Death, ed. and trans. Rosemary Horrox (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), 271–72. 93. Roisin, L’ hagiographie cistercienne, 189. 94. “Laborabat uterque morbo indicibili, ut anima eorum in malis tabescebat.” These youths were nephews of a cardinal whom Simon met at Fourth Lateran. The description of their problem as both an “unspeakable” disease in need of healing and a sin in need of penance suggests homosexuality. Vita Simonis 27, fols. 217r–v. 95. Ibid. 19, fol. 215r, and 39, fol. 220v. 96. The Quest of the Holy Grail, trans. P. M. Matarasso (London: Penguin, 1969). 97. Mulder-Bakker, Living Saints, 44–45. 98. For connections between Grail romance and the Flemish ruling dynasty, see Richard Barber, The Holy Grail: Imagination and Belief (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 28–29. On Cistercian connections see Karen Pratt, “The Cistercians and the Queste del saint Graal,” Reading Medieval Studies 21 (1995): 69–96, and Richard Barber, “Chivalry, Cistercianism, and the Grail,” in A Companion to the Lancelot­Grail Cycle, ed. Carol Dover (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2003), 3–12. 99. The classic work on friendship in the twelfth century is Brian Patrick McGuire, Friend­ ship and Community: The Monastic Experience, 350–1250, rev. ed. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010). 100. For a similar friendship between Mechthild of Hackeborn and her protégée, St. Gertrude, at Helfta, see my Chapter 3. 101. Life of Beatrice 1.27, pp. 32–33. Cf. Aelred of Rievaulx, Spiritual Friendship, trans. Mary Eugenia Laker (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1977). 102. Life of Beatrice 1.50, pp. 60–61. 103. Life of Arnulf 2.9, in Send Me God, 171. See Cawley’s introduction, pp. 20–22. 104. Life of Beatrice 1.57, pp. 72–73. 105. Life of Ida of Nivelles 25, in Send Me God, 70; Henriquez, Quinque prudentes virgines, 261. 106. Life of Beatrice 1.67, pp. 84–85. 107. Life of Ida of Nivelles 25, in Send Me God, 71; Henriquez, Quinque prudentes virgines, 262. 108. Life of Ida of Nivelles 25, in Send Me God, 72. 109. Anneke Mulder-Bakker, “Eve of St. Martin, the Faithful of Liège, and the Church,” in Lives of the Anchoresses, 118–47. 110. Life of Juliana 1.23, in Living Saints, 211. 111. Ibid. 1.29, p. 217.

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112. Ida the Gentle 42, p. 45. 113. Ibid. 43–44, pp. 46–47. 114. Ida the Eager 1.42–43, pp. 35–36. 115. Life of Mary 1.17, in Mary of Oignies, 57–58. 116. Ibid. 2.86, p. 109. 117. Life of Margaret 30, in Thomas of Cantimpré, 190. 118. Life of Arnulf 2.15, in Send Me God, 181–82. 119. Ibid. 2.17, pp. 184–86. 120. Ida the Gentle 36, p. 37. 121. Life of Ida of Nivelles 27, in Send Me God, 75–76. 122. Ibid. 28, p. 78; cf. Life of Beatrice 1.76–77, pp. 96–101. This event can be dated to May 1225. 123. Vita Simonis 41, fol. 221r, and 34, fols. 219r–v. 124. Caciola, Discerning Spirits; Rosalynn Voaden, God’s Words, Women’s Voices: The Dis­ cernment of Spirits in the Writing of Late­Medieval Women Visionaries (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell/York Medieval Press, 1999); 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; Wendy Love Anderson, The Discernment of Spirits: Assessing Visions and Visionaries in the Late Middle Ages (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2011). See my Chapter 5. 125. Cawley, Send Me God, 22. 126. Simons, Cities of Ladies, 2–4. The Latin teutonicus can denote either German or Dutch; cf. the modern parallel between “Dutch” and “deutsch.” 127. Caesarius of Heisterbach, Dialogus miraculorum III.33, p. 154. For another case of miraculous xenoglossia see Vita Simonis 25, fol. 216v. 128. Life of Lutgard 2.1, in Thomas of Cantimpré, 239. 129. Ibid. 2.40, p. 268. Teutonica would be better translated as “Dutch-speaking.” 130. For more on women’s vernacular xenoglossia, see Christine F. Cooper-Rompato, The Gift of Tongues: Women’s Xenoglossia in the Later Middle Ages (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010), 18–57. 131. Life of Arnulf 2.16, in Send Me God, 183. 132. Ibid. 184 and note 154. 133. Life of Ida of Nivelles 26, in Send Me God, 73–74. 134. Ibid. 27, pp. 74–75. 135. Philip of Clairvaux, Vita Elizabeth 24, p. 376. 136. Field, Courting Sanctity, 33–35, 86–88. 137. Life of Lutgard 2.10, in Thomas of Cantimpré, 247. 138. Barthélemy Ladsou, S.J., the seventeenth-century copyist of the Vita Simonis, raised the same question, answering that Lutgard wanted Simon’s sanctity to be acknowledged by all: “Sufficiens quidem se fuisset Lutgardis illa sanctissima, sed uoluit Simonis sanctitatem ab omnibus agnosci, et suo testimonio firmari. Irrefragabile enim est alicuius sancti de alio sancto testimonium.” Vita Simonis 44, fol. 222v. 139. For more exorcisms in this corpus see Life of Mary 1.30, in Mary of Oignies, 65–67; Life of Ida of Nivelles 7, in Send Me God, 41–42; and Vita Simonis 24–25, fols. 216r–v. Further discussion in Newman, “Possessed by the Spirit,” 740–49. 140. Life of Arnulf 2.18, in Send Me God, 187. 141. Life of Lutgard 1.21, in Thomas of Cantimpré, 235. 142. Gendered Voices: Medieval Saints and Their Interpreters, ed. Catherine M. Mooney (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999); Coakley, Women, Men, and Spiritual Power.

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143. For a new approach to priests who braved opprobrium to practice the cura monialium, see Fiona J. Griffiths, Nuns’ Priests’ Tales: Men and Salvation in Medieval Women’s Monastic Life (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018). 144. Life of Lutgard 2.38, in Thomas of Cantimpré, 266–67. 145. Life of Margaret 25, in Thomas of Cantimpré, 186–87. 146. Vita Simonis 28, fol. 217v. 147. Life of Beatrice 3.239, pp. 278–79. The gender of this friend is ambiguous; the person is described as both quidam specialis amicus . . . dilectissimus (masc.) and care sue (fem.). The hagiographer, following Beatrice’s diary, may himself have been uncertain. 148. Vita Idae Nivellensis xxx, in Henriquez, Quinque prudentes virgines, 281; Life of Ida of Nivelles 30, in Send Me God, 86. As noted above (n. 19), Henriquez’s 1630 edition of this text is bowdlerized. Cawley, working from the manuscript, translates the italicized phrase not found in the Latin print version. 149. Life of Ida of Nivelles 30, in Send Me God, 85. 150. Life of Mary 2.77, in Mary of Oignies, 103. 151. Vita Simonis 18, fol. 214v. 152. Life of Yvette 85, in Living Saints, 120–21. 153. Dilley, Monasteries and the Care of Souls, 234. 154. Thomas Rendall, “Natura non saltum facit: Virgil’s Telepathy in the Commedia Reconsidered,” Italica 91 (2014): 125–44. 155. Augustine, De civitate Dei 22.29.6 (PL 41:801); Concerning the City of God Against the Pagans 22.29, trans. Henry Bettenson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), 1087. 156. Gregory I, Moralia in Job 12.21 (PL 75:999bc). 157. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae III.Suppl., q. 72, art. 1: “Utrum sancti orationes nostras cognoscant.” http://www.corpusthomisticum.org /iopera .html. 158. Ibid. I, q. 107, art. 1. 159. Dante, De vulgari eloquentia 1.2, ed. Ludovicus Bertalot (Gebenna: Olschki, 1920), 10. 160. All quotations and translations are from Dante Alighieri, Paradiso, trans. Robert Hollander and Jean Hollander (New York: Anchor Books, 2007). Line numbers are given in the text. 161. The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, III: Paradiso, ed. and trans. John D. Sinclair (New York: Oxford, 1939), 143. 162. Fratris Johannis de Serravalle, Translatio et Comentum totius libri Dantis Aldigherii, ed. Marcellino da Civezza and Teofilo Domenichelli (Prati: Giachetti, 1891); Dartmouth Dante Project, https://dante.dartmouth.edu/. Serravalle was a Franciscan bishop of Firmano. 163. Ghino Ghinassi, “Neologismi,” in Enciclopedia Dantesca (1970). http://www.treccani .it/enciclopedia/neologismi _%28Enciclopedia-Dantesca%29/ 164. Charles Williams, The Figure of Beatrice: A Study in Dante (London: Faber and Faber, 1943), 204. 165. George William Rutler, The Curé d’Ars Today: Saint John Vianney (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1988), 93. 166. Ibid. 182, 186. 167. Ibid., 190. 168. Ibid., 196. 169. Ibid., 199. 170. Ibid., 199–200. 171. John McCaffery, The Friar of San Giovanni: Tales of Padre Pio (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1978), 7–9.

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172. “Padre Pio on His Gift of Reading Souls,” Infallible Catholic, blog post of 28 April 2012, accessed 12 October  2018: http://infallible-catholic.blogspot.com/2012/04/padre-pio-on-his -gift-of-reading-souls.html. 173. McCaffery, The Friar of San Giovanni, 16. 174. Ibid., 28–29. 175. All these tales are cited from the blog Infallible Catholic, which includes many more.

Chapter 3. Lovers 1. A parallel first noted by John Leyerle in “The Heart and the Chain,” in The Learned and the Lewed: Studies in Chaucer and Medieval Literature, ed. Larry D. Benson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974), 139. 2. Paul Pearsall, Gary  E.  R. Schwartz, and Linda  G.  S. Russek, “Changes in Heart Transplant Recipients That Parallel the Personalities of Their Donors,” Integrative Medicine 2 (1999): 66. 3. Heather Webb, The Medieval Heart (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 53. 4. John Donne, “The Ecstasy,” vv. 36, 41–43, in Selected Poetry, ed. John Carey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 113–16. Donne’s lines provide the epigraph for Cynthia Bourgeault, Love Is Stronger Than Death: The Mystical Union of Two Souls (New York: Bell Tower, 1997)—a work that continues the trajectory discussed here. 5. Martin  S. Bergmann, “Psychoanalytic Observations on the Capacity to Love,” in Separation—Individuation: Essays in Honor of Margaret S. Mahler, ed. John McDevitt and Calvin Settlage (New York: International Universities Press, 1971), 32. 6. Barbara Newman, Making Love in the Twelfth Century: “Letters of Two Lovers” in Con­ text (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016); Constant Mews, The Lost Love Let­ ters of Heloise and Abelard: Perceptions of Dialogue in Twelfth­Century France, with translations by Neville Chiavaroli (New York: St. Martin’s, 1999). The letters were first edited by Ewald Könsgen, Epistolae duorum amantium: Briefe Abaelards und Heloises? (Leiden: Brill, 1974). 7. Newman, Making Love, no. 24, pp. 114–15; Latin text in Mews, Lost Love Letters, 208. 8. On the union of wills or unitas spiritus as a theme in twelfth-century mysticism, see Bernard McGinn, The Growth of Mysticism: Gregory the Great Through the Twelfth Century (New York: Crossroad, 1994), 213–15, 264–67. Cicero also defines friendship as a union of wills (“voluntatum studiorum sententiarum summa consensio”): Laelius de amicitia 15, ed. and trans. J. G. F. Powell (Warminster, Wilts.: Aris and Phillips, 1990), 34. 9. Newman, Making Love, no. 24, p. 115. For indifferenter here and in Abelard’s logic, see Mews, Lost Love Letters, 124–28. 10. Newman, Making Love, no. 65, p. 168. 11. Ibid., no. 16, p. 102. 12. Ibid., no. 45, p. 139. 13. Ibid., no. 18, p. 103. 14. Ibid., no. 43, p. 107; Mews, p. 222. 15. Ibid., no. 85, p. 199; Mews, p. 264. 16. Ibid., no. 77, p. 188; Mews, p. 258. 17. On these formulas see Friedrich Ohly, “Du bist mein, ich bin dein. Du in mir, ich in dir. Ich du, du ich,” in Kritische Bewahrung: Beiträge zur deutschen Philologie. Festschrift für Werner Schröder, ed. Ernst-Joachim Schmidt (Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1974), 371–415, and Karl F. Morrison,

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“I Am You”: The Hermeneutics of Empathy in Western Literature, Theology, and Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 3–40. 18. William Shakespeare, “The Phoenix and the Turtle,” vv. 39–40, in Poems, ed. John Roe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 242. Cf. vv. 25–30: “So they loved, as love in twain / Had the essence but in one: / Two distincts, division none; / Number there in love was slain. // Hearts remote, yet not asunder; / Distance, and no space was seen.” 19. Newman, Making Love, no. 22, p. 109; Mews, Lost Love Letters, 204. 20. René Nelli, L’ érotique des troubadours (Toulouse: Privat, 1963), 315. In the version of A. J. Arberry, trans., The Ring of the Dove (London: Luzac, 1953), 124, the stanza reads: “Here let her live, so long as I / Draw breath, and when I come to die / My heart for comfort may she crave / In the dark silence of the grave.” 21. Carl von Kraus et al., Des Minnesangs Frühling (Leipzig: Hirzel, 1940), 319; trans. Newman, Making Love, 243. 22. Newman, Making Love, 245. 23. Ruth Cline, “Heart and Eyes,” Romance Philology 25 (1972): 263–97; Eric Jager, The Book of the Heart (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000); Barbara Newman, “Love’s Arrows: Christ as Cupid in Late Medieval Art and Devotion,” in The Mind’s Eye: Art and Theological Argument in the Middle Ages, ed. Jeffrey  F. Hamburger and Anne-Marie Bouché (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 263–86. 24. Bernart de Ventadorn, “Can vei la lauzeta mover,” vv. 13–16, in Lyrics of the Troubadours and Trouvères: An Anthology and a History, ed. and trans. Frederick Goldin (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1983), 146–47. 25. Conon de Béthune, “Ahi! Amours! com dure departie,” vv. 7–8, in Goldin, Lyrics, 338. 26. Thibaut de Champagne, “Ausi conme unicorne sui,” vv. 1–13, in Goldin, Lyrics, 466. 27. Gace Brulé, “Les oiseillons de mon païs,” vv. 21–30, in Goldin, Lyrics, 382–83. 28. Gace Brulé, “Ne puis faillir a bone chançon fere,” in Trouvères et Minnesänger: Recueil de textes, ed. István Frank (Saarbrücken: West-Ost, 1952), 182–83. This strophe appears in only one of the seven manuscripts. Cf. Nicolas Perella, The Kiss Sacred and Profane: An Interpretative History of Kiss Symbolism and Related Religio­Erotic Themes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 120–23. 29. Sarah Kay, Subjectivity in Troubadour Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 63. 30. Guido Cavalcanti, sonnet 23 (“Io vidi li occhi”), v. 14, in The Poetry of Guido Cavalcanti, ed. and trans. Lowry Nelson Jr. (New York: Garland, 1986), 30–31. On Cavalcanti’s poetics of the wounded heart see Webb, Medieval Heart, 74–79. 31. Jonathan Saville, The Medieval Erotic Alba: Structure as Meaning (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972); Gale Sigal, Erotic Dawn­Songs of the Middle Ages: Voicing the Lyric Lady (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996). 32. Thanks to the popularity of early poems by Walther von der Vogelweide and Wolfram von Eschenbach, there are far more specimens of the German Tageliet than of the Provençal alba or the Old French aube. Olive Sayce claims that “the exchange of hearts is very common in the dawn song”: Poets of the Minnesang (Oxford: Clarendon, 1967), 265. Yet A. T. Hatto, Eos: An Enquiry into the Theme of Lovers’ Meetings and Partings at Dawn in Poetry (The Hague: Mouton, 1965), is an 850-page anthology of dawn songs in fifty languages without a single exchange of hearts. 33. Ulrich won Winterstetten, “Bi liebe lac,” vv. 19–27, in Sayce, Poets of the Minnesang, 177.

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34. The lovers in Marie de France’s Guigemar exchange elaborately knotted garments that only they can untie, each swearing to accept no partner but the one who can undo the knot. Later in this chapter I treat the exchange of objects in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde. 35. Ulrich von Singenberg, “Wie hohes muotes ist ein man,” in Sayce, Poets of the Minne­ sang, 151–52. 36. Cf. Sigal, Erotic Dawn­Songs, 160–68. 37. William D. Paden Jr., ed. and trans., The Medieval Pastourelle, 2 vols. (New York: Garland, 1987). 38. Ulrich von Lichtenstein, Lied 30, strophe 7, vv. 1–7, cited in Ohly, “Du bist mein,” 392. 39. Nelli, L’ érotique, 209–15, 308–17. See also Elizabeth  A.  R. Brown, Claudia Rapp, and Brent D. Shaw, “Ritual Brotherhood in Ancient and Medieval Europe: A Symposium,” Traditio 52 (1997): 261–381. 40. In Ennobling Love: In Search of a Lost Sensibility (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), Jaeger takes Latin epistolary writing, rather than ethnography, as his point of departure. 41. Anne Callahan, Writing the Voice of Pleasure: Heterosexuality Without Women (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 2–3. In Callahan’s view this androgyny is illusion: “The couple in the romance is a chimera. There is no couple. There is only the feminized male and his idealization of an imaginary Other” (4). 42. In L’Amour et l’Occident (Paris: Plon, 1939), Denis de Rougemont identified Tristan as the paradigm of an erotics based in adultery and the exaltation of desire for its own sake, which he claims is ultimately a desire for death. 43. Gottfried von Strassburg, Tristan, 2 vols., ed. Karl Marold (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2004), 1:5. Senedaer and senedaerîn are masculine and feminine forms of “lover,” roughly equivalent to French ami and amie. 44. Tristan, ed. Marold, 1:329. 45. Donald Furber and Anne Callahan, Erotic Love in Literature: From Medieval Legend to Romantic Illusion (Troy, NY: Whitston, 1982), 11–26. 46. Thomas, Le roman de Tristan, ed. Félix Lecoy, trans. Emmanuèle Baumgartner and Ian Short (Paris: Champion, 2003), 68. 47. In the prologue to Cligès, Chrétien cites this work somewhat perversely as the romance “del roi Marc et d’Ysalt la blonde,” suppressing the hero’s name. Chrétien de Troyes, Cligès, édi­ tion bilingue, v. 5, ed. Laurence Harf-Lancner (Paris: Champion, 2006), 62. 48. On the heart in Chrétien see Gerard Brault, “Chrétien de Troyes’ Lancelot: The Eye and the Heart,” Bulletin bibliographique de la Société internationale arthurienne 24 (1973): 142–53; Begoña Aguiriano, “Le coeur dans Chrétien,” in Le “Cuer” au Moyen Âge (Réalité et Sénéfiance) (Aixen-Provence: Centre universitaire d’études et de recherches médiévales d’Aix, 1991): 11–25; Joseph Duggan, The Romances of Chrétien de Troyes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 136–39. 49. Emmanuèle Baumgartner, Le récit médiéval: XIIe–XIIIe siècles (Paris: Hachette, 1995), 54. 50. Peter Haidu, Aesthetic Distance in Chrétien de Troyes: Irony and Comedy in “Cligès” and “Perceval” (Geneva: Droz, 1968), 30–31, 70–76. 51. Chrétien de Troyes, Cligès, trans. Ruth Harwood Cline (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000), 68. Line numbers in this translation differ from those in the edition. 52. Laurence Harf-Lancner, introduction to Cligès, 18–24. 53. Dante Alighieri, Vita Nuova 25, trans. Mark Musa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973), 54.

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54. Haidu, Aesthetic Distance, 79n. 55. I disagree with Anne Callahan, who reads Chrétien as satirizing his lovers’ naïveté: “Although the writer is aware that the literary convention is absurd, his characters are already under the influence of the power of literature as a philtre and the language of love determines its nature in spite of the writer’s desire to change its representation, or to make explicit the fact that heterosexual desire is a metaphor for writing.” Writing the Voice of Pleasure, 52. 56. Chrétien de Troyes, Yvain, ou Le Chevalier au Lion, ed. Jan Nelson, Carleton W. Carroll, and Douglas Kelly (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1968), 125. 57. Chrétien de Troyes, Yvain, or The Knight with the Lion, trans. Ruth Harwood Cline (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1975), 74. 58. Leyerle, “The Heart and the Chain,” 137. 59. Dabney Anderson Bankert compares these sudden and gradual modes of erotic conversion with the Pauline and Augustinian models of religious conversion in “Secularizing the Word: Conversion Models in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde,” Chaucer Review 37 (2003): 196–218. 60. All citations are from Geoffrey Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde, ed. Stephen A. Barney, in The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd ed., ed. Larry D. Benson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987). 61. Franck Zeitoun, “The Eagle, the Boar and the Self: Dreams, Daydreams, and Violence in Troilus and Criseyde,” Cercles 6 (2003): 46. 62. Joseph E. Gallagher, “Criseyde’s Dream of the Eagle: Love and War in Troilus and Cri­ seyde,” Modern Language Quarterly 36 (1975): 130. 63. Cf. Shakespeare’s lines: “This is, and is not, Cressid. / Within my soul there doth conduce a fight / Of this strange nature, that a thing inseparate / Divides more wider than the sky and earth.” Troilus and Cressida V.ii.146–49, ed. John S. P. Tatlock (New York: Macmillan, 1912), 133. 64. The dating is based on topical allusions. But since much of the plot turns around the liturgical year and Easter is specified as 23 April—unusually late—the year of the action must be either 1223 or 1234. Jean-Charles Huchet, L’ étreinte des mots: Flamenca, entre poésie et roman (Caen: Paradigme, 1993), 16–17, 31. 65. The Romance of Flamenca, ed. and trans. E.  D. Blodgett (New York: Garland, 1995), 204–70; Huchet, Étreinte des mots, 74; Peire Rogier, “Ges non puesc en bon vers fallir,” vv. 41–44, in The Poems of the Troubadour Peire Rogier, ed. Derek E. T. Nicholson (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1976), 89. 66. René Nelli, Le Roman de Flamenca: Un art d’aimer occitanien du XIIIe siècle (Toulouse: Institut d’études occitanes, 1966), 93. 67. Flamenca, 310–11; translations altered. 68. Huchet, Étreinte des mots, 126–29. 69. This translation is adapted from The Romance of Flamenca, ed. Marion E. Porter, trans. Merton Jerome Hubert (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962), 359. I thank William Paden Jr. for his help with this passage. 70. Nelli, Roman de Flamenca, 99. 71. The narrative itself is not historical. Essentially the same story is told of the troubadour Guilhem de Cabestaing in Boccaccio’s Decameron (IV.9), and of the minnesinger Reinmann von Brennenberg. Jean-Jacques Vincensini, “Figure de l’imaginaire et figure du discours: Le motif du ‘Coeur Mangé’ dans la narration médiévale,” in Le “Cuer” au Moyen Âge, 439–59. For more eaten-heart stories see Milad Doueihi, A Perverse History of the Human Heart (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). A century ago John E. Matzke tried to establish a stemma of these tales: “The Legend of the Eaten Heart,” Modern Language Notes 26, no. 1 (Jan. 1911): 1–8.

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72. Jakemes, Le Roman du Castelain de Couci et de la Dame de Fayel, ed. Maurice Delbouille (Paris: Société des anciens textes français, 1936), 235. For excerpts in modern French see Danielle Régnier-Bohler, trans., Le coeur mangé: Récits érotiques et courtois des XIIe et XIIIe siècles (Paris: Stock, 1979), 241–51. 73. Machio Okada, “L’ ‘échange des coeurs’ et le thème du ‘coeur mangé’ dans le Roman du Castelain de Couci et de la Dame de Fayel,” Études de langue et littérature françaises 36 (1980): 1–15. 74. Helen Solterer, “Dismembering, Remembering the Châtelain de Couci,” Romance Phi­ lology 46 (1992): 112–13; Elizabeth A. R. Brown, “Death and the Body in the Later Middle Ages: The Legislation of Boniface VIII on the Division of the Corpse,” Viator 12 (1981): 221–70. 75. Okada, “L’ ‘échange des coeurs,’ ” 11–13. 76. Solterer, “Dismembering,” 111, 116. Cf. Webb, Medieval Heart, 158. 77. Barbara Newman, “La mystique courtoise: Thirteenth-Century Beguines and the Art of Love,” in From Virile Woman to WomanChrist: Studies in Medieval Religion and Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), 137–67; eadem, “Love Divine, All Loves Excelling,” in God and the Goddesses: Vision, Poetry, and Belief in the Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 138–89. 78. Pseudo-Richard of Saint-Victor, De gradibus charitatis 4 (PL 196:1205d). 79. Hermann Joseph, “Iubilus de Domino Nostro Iesu Christo,” Analecta Hymnica Medii Aevi, ed. Clemens Blume and G. M. Dreves, 55 vols. (repr. New York: Johnson Reprint, 1961), 50:543. 80. Vincent of Beauvais, Speculum historiale X.57, cited in Marie Anne Polo de Beaulieu, “La légende du coeur inscrit dans la littérature religieuse et didactique,” in Le “cuer” au moyen âge, 303. 81. Polo de Beaulieu, “La légende,” 306. 82. Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints, 2 vols., trans. William Granger Ryan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 1:142–43. 83. Thomas of Cantimpré, Vita Lutgardis Aquiriensis I.12, ed. G. Henschen, AASS Jun., vol. 4 (Paris: Palmé, 1867), 193; Life of Lutgard of Aywières, trans. Margot H. King and Barbara Newman, in Thomas of Cantimpré: The Collected Saints’ Lives, ed. Barbara Newman (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008), 227. 84. André Cabassut, “Coeurs, changement des,” in Dictionnaire de spiritualité ascétique et mystique, doctrine et histoire, 17 vols. (Paris: Beauchesne, 1932–95): II.2, cols. 1046–51. 85. Mechthild of Magdeburg, The Flowing Light of the Godhead 1.4, trans. Frank Tobin (New York: Paulist, 1998), 43. 86. See Barbara Newman, “Mechthild of Magdeburg at Helfta: A Study in Literary Influence,” in Women Intellectuals and Leaders in the Middle Ages, ed. Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, Katie Ann-Marie Bugyis, and John Van Engen (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell and Brewer, 2020), 383–96. 87. The two mystical nuns, Mechthild of Hackeborn and Gertrude of Helfta, should not be confused with the beguine Mechthild of Magdeburg and the abbess Gertrude of Hackeborn. For their texts see Mechthild of Hackeborn, Liber specialis gratiae, in Revelationes Gertrudianae ac Mechtildianae, ed. monks of Solesmes, vol. 2 (Paris: Oudin, 1877), trans. Barbara Newman, The Book of Special Grace (New York: Paulist, 2017), and Gertrude of Helfta, Legatus divinae pietatis, in Oeuvres spirituelles, ed. Pierre Doyère et al., in Sources chrétiennes, vols. 139 (bks. 1–2), 143 (bk. 3), 255 (bk. 4), and 331 (bk. 5) (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1968–86), trans. Alexandra Barratt, The Herald of God’s Loving­Kindness, 4 vols. (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1991–2020). 88. Rosalynn Voaden, “All Girls Together: Community, Gender and Vision at Helfta,” in Medieval Women in Their Communities, ed. Diane Watt (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,

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1997), 72–91; Claudia Kolletzki, “ ‘Über die Wahrheit dieses Buches’: Die Entstehung des ‘Liber Specialis Gratiae’ Mechthilds von Hackeborn zwischen Wirklichkeit und Fiktion,” in “Vor dir steht die leere Schale meiner Sehnsucht”: Die Mystik der Frauen von Helfta, ed. Michael Bangert and Hildegund Keul (Leipzig: St. Benno, 1998), 156–79; Margarete Hubrath, “The Liber specialis gratiae as a Collective Work of Several Nuns,” Jahrbuch der Oswald von Wolkenstein Gesellschaft 11 (1999): 233–44; Anna Harrison, “ ‘Oh! What Treasure is in this Book?’ Writing, Reading, and Community at the Monastery of Helfta,” Viator 39, no. 1 (2008): 75–106. 89. Sabine  B. Spitzlei, Erfahrungsraum Herz: Zur Mystik des Zisterzienserinnenklosters Helfta im 13. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1991). 90. Voaden, “All Girls Together,” 74. 91. Liber specialis gratiae 1.19, pp. 61–62; trans. Newman, Book of Special Grace, 77. 92. Liber 2.23, pp. 165–66; Book of Special Grace, 131–32. 93. Legatus divinae pietatis 3.30.2, in Oeuvres spirituelles 3:134–36; trans. Barratt, Herald, 2:104. 94. Harrison, “ ‘Oh! What Treasure,’ ” 101. 95. Barratt, Herald, 2:95n. 96. On the gradual withdrawal of the chalice from the laity, see Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 45, 56, 65, 118, 230; Jef Lamberts, “Liturgie et spiritualité de l’eucharistie au XIIIe siècle,” in Fête­Dieu (1246–1996): Actes du colloque de Liège, 12–14 septem­ bre 1996, ed. André Haquin (Louvain-la-Neuve: Université Catholique de Louvain, 1999), 81–95. 97. Legatus 3.26.2, p. 124. 98. Ibid. 3.30.1, p. 132. 99. Ibid. 3.9.4, p. 38; Barratt, Herald, 2:44. 100. Liber 5.22, p. 355; Book of Special Grace, 243. 101. This phrase dates back at least to the mid-fourteenth-century Dominican sisterbooks. At St. Katharinental, for example, Christ tells the prioress that those who indulge in “particular love” (sunder minn) cause his heart more bitterness than his Passion causes her own heart. Das “St. Kath­ arinentaler Schwesternbuch”: Untersuchung, Edition, Kommentar, ed. Ruth Meyer (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1995), 98. It is not clear whether the main concern was unchastity or cliquishness. 102. The following section first appeared in “Iam cor meum non sit suum: Exchanging Hearts, from Heloise to Helfta,” in From Knowledge to Beatitude: St.  Victor, Twelfth­Century Scholars, and Beyond. Essays in Honor of Grover A. Zinn, Jr., ed. E. Ann Matter and Lesley Smith (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013), 281–99. For another rare testament of close friendship between medieval women, see Anneke B. Mulder-Bakker et al., The Dedicated Spiritual Life of Upper Rhine Noble Women: A Study and Translation of a Fourteenth­Century Spiritual Biography of Gertrude Rickeldey of Ortenberg and Heilke of Staufenberg (Turnhout: Brepols, 2017). 103. Legatus 1.3.2, p. 136. 104. Ibid. 1.11.9, p. 178; Barratt, Herald, 1:74. 105. Ibid. 1.14.6, p. 202. 106. Ibid. 1.16.1, p. 210; Barratt, Herald, 1:90. 107. Ibid. 1.16.2, p. 212; Barratt, Herald, 1:90. 108. Much of Legatus, Book 5, was later added to the Liber specialis gratiae as Book 7. 109. Legatus 5.4.10, pp. 90–92. 110. Ibid. 5.4.6, p. 86. Cf. Liber 7.5; Book of Special Grace, 228.

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111. Ibid. 5.4.18, p. 100. Cf. Liber 7.11; Book of Special Grace, 234–35. 112. Liber 2.19, p. 156; Book of Special Grace, 131. 113. Legatus 5.4.18, p. 102. Cf. Liber 7.11; Book of Special Grace, 235. 114. 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 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 107–19. 115. This line of reading derives ultimately from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: En­ glish Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985). See also Carolyn Dinshaw, “Reading Like a Man: The Critics, the Narrator, Troilus, and Pandarus,” in Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 28–64; Tison Pugh, “Queer Pandarus? Silence and Sexual Ambiguity in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde,” Philological Quarterly 80 (2001): 17–35; John Hill, “Aristocratic Friendship in Troilus and Criseyde: Pandarus, Courtly Love and Ciceronian Brotherhood in Troy,” in New Readings of Chaucer’s Poetry, ed. Robert G. Benson and Susan J. Ridyard (Woodbridge, Suffolk: D. S. Brewer, 2003), 165–82. 116. The term is Judith Bennett’s: “ ‘Lesbian-Like’ and the Social History of Lesbianisms,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 9 (2000): 1–24. See also Ann Matter, “My Sister, My Spouse: Woman-Identified Women in Medieval Christianity,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 2, no. 2 (1986): 81–93. 117. For their “mystical love noir” see Karma Lochrie, “Mystical Acts, Queer Tendencies,” in Constructing Medieval Sexuality, ed. Karma Lochrie, Peggy McCracken, and James A. Schultz (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 181. 118. De B. Juliana Falconeria, c. 17, AASS Jun., vol. 4 (Paris: Palmé, 1867), 921; Peter Browe, Die eucharistischen Wunder des Mittelalters (Breslau: Müller und Seiffert, 1938), 30. 119. Browe, Die eucharistischen Wunder, 28–30; Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, 2:383. 120. Karen Scott, “Mystical Death, Bodily Death: Catherine of Siena and Raymond of Capua on the Mystic’s Encounter with God,” in Gendered Voices: Medieval Saints and Their Inter­ preters, ed. Catherine M. Mooney (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 136–67. 121. Die Legenda Maior (Vita Catharinae Senensis) des Raimund von Capua 2.6.186, ed. Jörg Jungmayr, 2 vols. (Berlin: Weidler, 2004), 1:264; Raymond of Capua, The Life of Catherine of Si­ ena, trans. Conleth Kearns (Wilmington, DE: Michael Glazier, 1980), 180. 122. Legenda Maior 2.6.179, ed. Jungmayr, 1:258; Life of Catherine, trans. Kearns, 174. 123. Legenda Maior 2.6.180, ed. Jungmayr, 1:258; Life of Catherine, trans. Kearns, 174–75 (slightly altered). 124. Legenda Maior 2.6.180, ed. Jungmayr, 1:258; Life of Catherine, trans. Kearns, 175. 125. Jeffrey Hamburger, “Sainte Catherine de Sienne: Manuscrit germanique du XVe siècle,” Art de l’enluminure 11 (Dec. 2004–Jan. 2005): 44. 126. See letter T346 to Pope Urban VI, in The Letters of Catherine of Siena, trans. Suzanne Noffke, 4 vols. (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2000–2008), 4:57. 127. Letter T371 in Noffke, 4:362. 128. Letter T373 in Noffke, 4:365–66. 129. The same might be said of the stroke-cum-epiphany experienced by Thomas Aquinas shortly before his death; after that event he could no longer write because all he had said of God seemed to him “like straw.” Neither a secular interpreter nor an incarnational theologian should be shocked by the coincidence of such revelations with catastrophic physical events. See Carol Zaleski, Otherworld Journeys: Accounts of Near­Death Experience in Medieval and Modern Times (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).

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130. For radically differing interpretations of Catherine’s inedia, see Rudolph M. Bell, Holy Anorexia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 22–53, and Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast, 202–7. 131. This motif also occurs in several romances, including Der arme Heinrich by Hartmann von Aue, La queste del saint Graal, and the Middle English Amis and Amiloun. 132. According to Heather Webb, Raymond used the account by Catherine of her final sacrifice to construct his narrative of her exchange of hearts with Christ. But these are two different events, one near the beginning and one at the end of her career. “Catherine of Siena’s Heart,” Speculum 80 (2005): 802–17. 133. Legenda Maior 3.2.345, ed. Jungmayr, 1:476–78; Life of Catherine, trans. Kearns, 320. 134. Katharine Park, “Relics of a Fertile Heart: The ‘Autopsy’ of Clare of Montefalco,” in The Material Culture of Sex, Procreation, and Marriage in Premodern Europe, ed. Anne McClanan and Karen Rosoff Encarnación (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 115–34; Cordelia Warr, “ReReading the Relationship Between Devotional Images, Visions, and the Body: Clare of Montefalco and Margaret of Città di Castello,” Viator 38, no. 1 (2007): 217–49. 135. Richard Kieckhefer, Unquiet Souls: Fourteenth­Century Saints and Their Religious Mi­ lieu (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 22–33; Dyan Elliott, “Authorizing a Life: The Collaboration of Dorothea of Montau and John Marienwerder,” in Gendered Voices, ed. Mooney, 168–91; John Coakley, Women, Men, and Spiritual Power: Female Saints and Their Male Col­ laborators (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 193–210. 136. Kieckhefer, Unquiet Souls, 27–29. 137. Johannes Marienwerder, Vita [Latina] Dorotheae Montoviensis 3.1.b, ed. Hans Westpfahl (Cologne: Böhlau, 1964), 112. 138. Coakley, Women, Men, and Spiritual Power, 197. 139. Die Akten des Kanonisationsprozesses Dorotheas von Montau von 1394 bis 1521, ed. Richard Stachnik (Cologne: Böhlau, 1978), 23. 140. Ibid., 283. 141. Ibid., 284. 142. For this miraculous organ transplant in art and legend, see Leonard Barkan, “Cosmas and Damian: Of Medicine, Miracles, and the Economies of the Body,” in Organ Transplanta­ tion: Meanings and Realities, ed. Stuart J. Youngner, Renée C. Fox, and Laurence J. O’Connell (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996), 221–51. 143. Akten, 283–84; Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, 2:198. 144. Akten, 214. See my Chapter 4 for Dorothea’s mystical pregnancy. 145. Elliott, “Authorizing a Life,” 170. 146. Jérôme Ribet, La mystique divine, distinguée des contrefaçons diaboliques et des analo­ gies humaines, 4 vols. (Paris: Poussielgue, 1879–83), 2:635–36. 147. Cabassut, “Coeurs, changement des,” 1047–49. 148. Webb, Medieval Heart, 146. 149. These two paragraphs are taken from my article “Exchanging Hearts: A Medievalist Looks at Transplant Surgery,” Spiritus 12 (2012): 1–20. 150. Pearsall, Schwartz, and Russek, “Changes in Heart Transplant Recipients.” 151. “Man with suicide victim’s heart takes own life,” Associated Press, 6 April  2008. 3984857/ns/us_news-life/t/man-suicide-victims-heart-takes-own-life/#.XJkia6R7kdU, accessed 25 March 2019. 152. Pearsall et  al., “Changes in Heart Transplant Recipients,” 72. Of the seventy-four transplant patients, only twenty-three—including all ten of those profiled in the article—

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received heart transplants. Changes in the recipients of other organs were less durable and profound. 153. Pietro Castelnuovo-Tedesco, “Transplantation: Psychological Implications of Changes in Body Image,” in Psychonephrology 1: Psychological Factors in Hemodialysis and Transplanta­ tion, ed. Norman B. Levy (New York: Plenum, 1981), 222. 154. Claire Sylvia with William Novak, A Change of Heart: A Memoir (Boston: Little, Brown, 1997), 219–35. 155. See also Nancy Weber’s romance novel Brokenhearted (New York: Dutton, 1989) and the phi losopher Jean-Luc Nancy’s autobiographical essay, L’ intrus (Paris: Galilée, 2000). That essay inspired Claire Denis’s 2004 film of the same title. For a comparable dialogue between medieval and modern perspectives, see Caroline Walker Bynum, “Material Continuity, Personal Survival and the Resurrection of the Body: A Scholastic Discussion in Its Medieval and Modern Contexts,” in Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medi­ eval Religion (New York: Zone, 1991), 239–97. 156. Y. Inspector, I. Kutz, and D. David, “Another Person’s Heart: Magical and Rational Thinking in the Psychological Adaptation to Heart Transplantation,” Israel Journal of Psychiatry and Related Sciences 41 (2004): 161–73. 157. B. Bunzel, B. Schmidl-Mohl, A. Grundböck, and G. Wollenek, “Does Changing the Heart Mean Changing Personality? A Retrospective Inquiry on 47 Heart Transplant Patients,” Quality of Life Research 1 (1992): 251–56. 158. e. e. cummings, “i carry your heart,” in A Selection of Poems, ed. Horace Gregory (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1965), 156.

Chapter 4. Mother and Child 1. See Sylvie Laurent, Naître au moyen âge: De la conception à la naissance. La grossesse et l’accouchement (XIIe–XVe siècle) (Paris: Léopard d’Or, 1989); Shulamith Shahar, Childhood in the Middle Ages (London: Routledge, 1990); Clarissa W. Atkinson, The Oldest Vocation: Chris­ tian Motherhood in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991); Katharine Park, “Managing Childbirth and Fertility in Medieval Europe,” in Reproduction: Antiquity to the Present Day, ed. Nick Hopwood, Rebecca Flemming, and Lauren Kassell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 153–66. 2. By Edgar Allen. Nevertheless, the ancient Greek physician Herophilus discovered the ovaries around 300 b.c.e., and Galen described them as “female testicles.” Atkinson, The Oldest Vocation, 49. 3. Aristotle, Generation of Animals 2.3, trans. A. L. Peck (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953), 171–75. 4. Katharine Park, “Medicine and Natural Philosophy: Naturalistic Traditions,” in The Oxford Handbook of Women and Gender in Medieval Europe, ed. Judith M. Bennett and Ruth Mazo Karras (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 84–100. 5. Laurent, Naître au moyen âge, 64–66. 6. Park, “Medicine and Natural Philosophy,” 91, 95. 7. Pliny the Elder, Natural History, vol. 8, trans. W. H. S. Jones, bk. 28, chap. 23 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963), 55–63; Isidore of Seville, Etymologies 11.1.141 (PL 82:414b). 8. William of Conches says the newborn is less mature at birth than other animals and unable to walk because it’s fed in the womb by corrupting menstrual blood. Dragmaticon philosophiae

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6.10.4, ed. Italo Ronca, CCCM 152 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1997), 216. Cf. Bartholomaeus Anglicus, On the Properties of Things: John Trevisa’s Translation of De proprietatibus rerum, vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975), 6.4, p. 298. 9. Cf. Laurent, Naître au moyen âge, 140. 10. Hildegard of Bingen, Causae et curae, ed. Paul Kaiser (Leipzig: Teubner, 1903), 67–68. 11. Ibid., 35–36. 12. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologica 1.99.2 ad 2, trans. English Dominican Fathers (1947), https://dhspriory.org /thomas/summa/. 13. Bartholomaeus Anglicus, On the Properties of Things 6.7, p. 303. 14. The Distaff Gospels: A First Modern English Edition of Les Évangiles des Quenouilles, trans. and ed. Madeleine Jeay and Kathleen Garay (Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview, 2006), 228–31. 15. Laurent, Naître au moyen âge, 97. 16. Distaff Gospels, 171. To produce the same result, the Trotula recommends that the man drink a potion made from wine and the dried, powdered womb of a hare, while the woman should use a hare’s testicles for this purpose. The hare was recommended because of its high fertility. The Trotula: An English Translation of the Medieval Compendium of Women’s Medicine, ed. and trans. Monica H. Green (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 77. 17. Distaff Gospels, 85. 18. Ibid., 145. 19. Ibid. 20. Laurent, Naître au moyen âge, 132. 21. Distaff Gospels, 93. 22. Ibid., 87, 97. 23. Women’s Secrets: A Translation of Pseudo­Albertus Magnus’s De Secretis Mulierum with Commentaries, trans. Helen Rodnite Lemay (Albany: SUNY Press, 1992), 116. 24. Distaff Gospels, 95. 25. Laurent, Naître au moyen âge, 128. 26. Herman W. Roodenburg, “The Maternal Imagination: The Fears of Pregnant Women in Seventeenth-Century Holland,” Journal of Social History 21 (1988): 701–16; Marie-Hélène Huet, Monstrous Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993); Mary E. Fissell, “Hairy Women and Naked Truths: Gender and the Politics of Knowledge in Aristotle’s Mas­ terpiece,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 60 (2003): 43–74. 27. Soranus’ Gynecology, trans. Oswei Temkin (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1956), 45. 28. Ibid., 51. 29. Ibid., 57. 30. Trotula, trans. Green, 77. Trotula is the name given to an ensemble of three texts on women’s medicine from twelfth-century Salerno, ascribed to the female practitioner Trota. As Green explains, Trota was the author of a longer, general compilation, Practical Medicine, but the widely circulated Trotula corpus is the work of many authors. 31. Aldobrandino of Siena, Le régime du corps de Maître Aldebrandin de Sienne: Texte fran­ çais du XIIIe siècle, ed. Louis Landouzy and Roger Pepin, 2 vols. (Paris: Champion, 1911), 1:71–72. 32. Ibid., 1:72. 33. Ibid. 34. Le livre du Chevalier de la Tour Landry pour l’enseignement de ses filles, ed. Anatole de Montaiglon (Paris: Jannet, 1854), 59.

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35. Peter Biller, “Childbirth in the Middle Ages,” History Today 36, no. 8 (1986): 47. 36. Shahar, Childhood in the Middle Ages, 39. 37. Biller, “Childbirth,” 46; Carole Rawcliffe, “Women, Childbirth, and Religion in Later Medieval England,” in Women and Religion in Medieval England, ed. Diana Wood (Oxford: Oxbow, 2003), 96. 38. Laurent, Naître au moyen âge, 133–34; Women’s Secrets, trans. Lemay, 121. 39. Women’s Secrets, trans. Lemay, 102. 40. Albertus Magnus, Commentarius in librum IV Sententiarum Petri Lombardi 4.31.22.1, as cited in James A. Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 451–52. 41. Raymond of Penyafort, Summa 4.2.8; Alexander of Hales, Summa theologica 2–2.3.5.2.1.3.2 ad 8; as cited in John T. Noonan Jr., Contraception: A History of Its Treatment by the Catholic Theologians and Canonists, rev. ed. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1986), 284. 42. Katharine Park finds no evidence for midwives between Roman antiquity and the thirteenth century, except as “literary ghosts” cited from ancient texts. “Managing Childbirth and Fertility,” 157. Until then, childbeds were attended only by matrons—experienced relatives and friends of the mother. 43. Rawcliffe, “Women, Childbirth, and Religion,” 95; Louis Haas, “ Women and Childbearing in Medieval Florence,” in Medieval Family Roles: A Book of Essays, ed. Cathy Jorgensen Itnyre (New York: Garland, 1996), 93. 44. Fiona Harris-Stoertz, “Pregnancy and Childbirth in Twelfth- and Thirteenth-Century French and English Law,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 21 (2012): 267, 269. 45. Ibid., 270–71. 46. Andrew Galloway, “Intellectual Pregnancy, Metaphysical Femininity, and the Social Doctrine of the Trinity in Piers Plowman,” Yearbook of Langland Studies 12 (1998): 119–21. 47. Atkinson, The Oldest Vocation, 83–84, 116. 48. Ibid., 149. 49. Haas, “Women and Childbearing,” 88. 50. Rawcliffe, “Women, Childbirth, and Religion,” 94. 51. Shahar, Childhood in the Middle Ages, 35; T. H. Hollingsworth, “A Demographic Study of the British Ducal Families,” Population Studies 11 (1957): 4–26. 52. Hildegard, Causae et curae, 105. 53. Holy Maidenhood, in Anchoritic Spirituality, trans. Anne Savage and Nicholas Watson (New York: Paulist, 1991), 238. 54. Laurent, Naître au moyen âge, 223; Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Not of Woman Born: Representations of Caesarean Birth in Medieval and Renaissance Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), 26. 55. St. Margaret of Antioch was the best-known patron saint of childbirth, along with the Virgin Mary. Others included St. Anne, St. Dorothy, St. Leonard (the patron of prisoners), and many male and female saints of purely local reputation. 56. Rawcliffe, “Women, Childbirth, and Religion,” 107–9. 57. Park, “Managing Childbirth and Fertility,” 156. Because St.  Margaret had burst unharmed from the belly of a demonic dragon, she was a figure of successful delivery. 58. William D. Paden and Frances Freeman Paden, “Swollen Woman, Shifting Canon: A Midwife’s Charm and the Birth of Secular Romance Lyric,” PMLA 152, no. 2 (2010): 308. 59. Katharine Park, personal communication, 14 June 2020.

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60. Alphonse Aymar, “Le sachet accoucheur et ses mystères: Contribution à l’étude du folklore de la Haute-Auvergne,” Annales du Midi 38 (1926): 273–347. 61. This ancient magical device, popular throughout the Middle Ages, consists of twenty-five squares in rows and columns of five, bearing the letters sator arepo tenet opera rotas. They read identically forward and backward, up and down. A double anagram of the Pater noster with alphas and omegas, the device was widely used for protection in childbirth and other perils. Richard Kieckhefer, Magic in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 77–78. 62. According to Jacques Gélis, such “birthing bags” were “used for centuries in central and southern France [and] still much believed in at the end of the nineteenth century.” They may have been used to assist in the birth of livestock as well as babies. Jacques Gélis, History of Childbirth: Fertility, Pregnancy and Birth in Early Modern Europe, trans. Rosemary Morris (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1991), 147. 63. If the mother had died in labor without delivering her child, she herself might be buried with a stake through her womb. Burchard of Worms, Decretorum libri viginti 19 (PL 140:974d–975a). 64. Pierre André Sigal, “La grossesse, l’accouchement et l’attitude envers l’enfant mort-né à la fin du Moyen Âge d’après les récits de miracles,” in Santé, médecine et assistance au Moyen Âge (Paris: Éditions du C.T.H.S., 1987), 31. 65. Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Not of Woman Born, 26. 66. If a male surgeon or barber was available, he might perform the incision while the midwife removed and baptized the child. Park, “Managing Childbirth and Fertility,” 160. 67. The surgeons are Bernard de Gordon, Guy de Chauliac, and Piero d’Argellata; Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Not of Woman Born, 32–36. 68. Shahar, Childhood in the Middle Ages, 49; Kathryn Taglia, “Delivering a Christian Identity: Midwives in Northern French Synodal Legislation, c. 1200–1500,” in Religion and Medicine in the Middle Ages, ed. Peter Biller and Joseph Ziegler (York: York Medieval Press, 2001), 83n22. 69. Rawcliffe, “Women, Childbirth, and Religion,” 110–11. 70. Shahar, Childhood in the Middle Ages, 49. 71. Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Not of Woman Born, 116–17. 72. Hereford Cathedral, according to a royal license of 1398. Christopher Daniell, Death and Burial in Medieval England, 1066–1550 (London: Routledge, 1997), 117. 73. Donald Mowbray, “A Community of Sufferers and the Authority of Masters: The Development of the Idea of Limbo by Masters of Theology at the University of Paris (c. 1230–c. 1300),” in Authority and Community in the Middle Ages, ed. Donald Mowbray, Rhiannon Purdie, and Ian P. Wei (Sutton, U.K.: Stroud, 1999), 43–68. 74. Sigal, “La grossesse,” 32. 75. Aldobrandino of Siena, Le régime du corps, 1:75. 76. Bartholomaeus Anglicus, On the Properties of Things 6.4, p. 298. 77. Francesco Barberino, Del reggimento e costumi di donna, bk. 13, ed. Carlo Baudi di Vesme (Bologna: Gaetano Romagnoli, 1875), 308–11. The quoted line is 13.169, p. 311. 78. Shahar, Childhood in the Middle Ages, 69–72. 79. Ibid., 60–61. 80. Aldobrandino of Siena, Le régime du corps, 1:76–77. 81. Atkinson, The Oldest Vocation, 60. 82. Innocent III, Etsi Judeos, in The Apostolic See and the Jews, ed. Shlomo Simonsohn, 8 vols. (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1988–91), 1:87.

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83. Jeremy Cohen, “Pope Innocent III, Christian Wet Nurses, and Jews: A Misunderstanding and Its Impact,” Jewish Quarterly Review 107 (2017): 127. 84. Ibid., 121–23. 85. Bartholomaeus Anglicus, On the Properties of Things 6.9, p. 304. Spelling modernized. 86. Dante Alighieri, De vulgari eloquentia 1.1 (Porto Alegre: Tiago Tresoldi, 2011), 2. 87. Aldobrandino of Siena, Le régime du corps, 1:77. 88. Liber de passionibus puerorum Galieni, cited in William  F. MacLehose, “Nurturing Danger: High Medieval Medicine and the Problem(s) of the Child,” in Medieval Mothering, ed. John Carmi Parsons and Bonnie Wheeler (New York: Garland, 1996), 14. 89. Shahar, Childhood in the Middle Ages, 67. 90. Ibid., 68. 91. Bernard de Gordon, De conservatione vitae humanae, in Opus, Lilium medicinae inscrip­ tum (Lyon: Rovillium, 1574), 16; Konrad of Megenberg, Ökonomik, ed. Sabine Krüger, 1.2.25, in Die Werke des Konrad von Megenberg (Stuttgart: Hiersemann, 1973), 110; [pseudo-] Arnold of Villanova, Regimen sanitatis ad regem Aragonum, in Opera medica omnia, vol. 10, pt. 1, ed. Luis García-Ballester and Michael R. McVaugh (Barcelona: Seminarium Historiae Scientiae Barchinone, 1996), 374. 92. Paolo da Certaldo, Libro di buoni costumi, ed. Alfredo Schiaffini (Florence: Felice Le Monnier, 1945), 127. 93. Shahar, Childhood in the Middle Ages, 81. 94. Liber sacramentorum Romanae ecclesiae, 3.53–54 (PL 74:1215c–1217b). 95. Michel Andrieu, Les ordines romani du haut moyen âge: Les manuscrits, 5 vols. (Louvain: Spicilegium Sacrum Lovaniense, 1931–61), 1:121; Victor Leroquais, Les pontificaux manuscrits des bibliothèques publiques de France, 3 vols. (Macon: Protat Frères, 1937), 2:143; Godfrid Storms, Anglo­Saxon Magic (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1948), 43. The English manuscript is Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 41, fol. 329. 96. Michel Andrieu, Le pontifical romain au Moyen­Age, vol. III, Le pontifical de Guillaume Durand (Vatican: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1940), 678–79. 97. Ibid., 679. 98. The blessing begins with the prayer of Nehemiah, 2 Maccabees 1:24–26. The apocryphal text refers in general to God’s sanctification of the fathers, while the liturgical prayer specifies that he sanctified them in their mothers’ wombs. Cf. Jeremiah 1:5, Luke 1:15. 99. Severinus Lueg, Manuale benedictionum: Accedunt processiones variae publicis necessita­ tibus congruentes (Passau: Ambrosius Ambrosi, 1845), 180–81. 100. Medieval Latin Liturgy in English Translation, ed. Matthew Cheung Salisbury (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute, 2017), 103. The manuscript is Oxford, Bodleian Gough Missals 31, rear flyleaf. Some later editions of the Sarum Missal in English include a version of this prayer, falsely ascribed to Pope Celestine. 101. Johann Wild, Opuscula varia (Lyon: Rovillium, 1567), 1019–20; Luis de Granada, Par­ adisus precum (Cologne: Quentel, 1610), 506–7; David-Gregor Corner, Magnum promptuarium catholicae devotionis (Vienna: Gelbhaar, 1645), 593; Joachim von Windhag, Medulla sacrarum precationum (Vienna: Cosmerovius, 1661), 962. I cite these and other early modern prayer books from digitized editions, which are often more recent printings of older texts. 102. John Foxe, Actes and Monuments of these Latter and Perillous Dayes (London: John Day, 1563), 1015. 103. Among these handbooks are Camillo de Neufville, Liber sacerdotalis, seu rituale secun­ dum usum primae Lugdunensis ecclesiae (Lyon: de Ville, 1692), 235–42; Rituale Augustanum, ad

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normam Ritualis Romani (Augsburg: Labhart, 1764), 382–84; Lueg, Manuale benedictionum, 180–82; Hyacinthe-Louis de Quélen, Rituale Parisiense (1697; repr. Paris: LeClerc, 1839), 607–9; Rituale Rothomagense (1739; repr. Paris: Didot, 1844), 276–77. 104. The date was changed to 31 May in a 1969 calendar revision, though 2 July is retained by Catholics in Germany and Slovakia, as well as Old Catholics and Anglicans. Some Eastern Orthodox churches introduced the feast in the nineteenth century and observe it on 30 March. 105. Jaroslav Polc, De origine festi Visitationis B.M.V. (Rome: Libreria Editrice della Pontificia Università Lateranense, 1967); Richard  W. Pfaff, New Liturgical Feasts in Later Medieval England (Oxford: Clarendon, 1970), 40–61. 106. For another example see Jeffrey F. Hamburger, St. John the Divine: The Deified Evange­ list in Medieval Art and Theology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 81, fig. 68. 107. On the dates, authorship, and usage of all these offices I follow Pfaff, New Liturgical Feasts, 40–61. 108. Unpublished, but three of John’s sequences for the Visitation appear in Analecta hym­ nica Medii Aevi, ed. Guido Maria Dreves and Clemens Blume, 55 vols. (Leipzig: Reisland, 1886– 1922), 48:422–24. 109. AH 24:89–94, with additional hymns in 52:47–51. 110. AH 24:94–98, with additional hymns in 52:51–54. 111. AH 24:98–102. 112. Partial publication in AH 52:54–55. 113. AH 24:117–19. 114. AH 24:102–105. 115. These are “Levi tribus glorietur” (AH 24:105–8), “Pueri laudate” (AH 24:109–11), “Mariam missus caelitus” (AH 24:111–14), “Sacerdos novae gratiae” (PL 24:114–17), and “Properavit virgo mater” (PL 24:120–22). 116. AH 52:52, no. 46, stanza 4. 117. Histoire de Marie et de Jésus, vv. 1333–48, ed. C. Chabaneau; as cited and translated in Maureen Barry McCann Boulton, Sacred Fictions of Medieval France: Narrative Theology in the Lives of Christ and the Virgin, 1150–1500 (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2015), 48. 118. AH 48:422, no. 390, strophes 3b–4b. 119. Pfaff, New Liturgical Feasts, 52–53. 120. Ambrose, Expositio Evangelii secundum Lucam 1.22–23, 25 (PL 15:1560c–1561c). Translation (slightly modified) from The Hours of the Divine Office in English and Latin: A Bilingual Edition of the Roman Breviary Text, 3 vols. (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1963–64), 2:1962–63. 121. Origen, trans. Jerome, Translatio XXXIX Homiliarum, no. 7 (PL 26:234ab). 122. Petrus Clarificator, De congruentia epistolae ex libro Canticorum desumptae cum festo Visitationis (ca. 1386–89), cited in Polc, De origine festi, 107. 123. “Sermon for the Visitation of the Virgin,” in Three Sermons for Nova Festa from Cax­ ton’s 1491 Edition of John Mirk’s Festial, ed. Susan Powell (Heidelberg: Winter, 2007), 2. The anonymous preacher may have belonged to Syon Abbey, where this feast was especially favored. 124. Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Not of Woman Born, 115. 125. “Sermon for the Visitation,” ed. Powell, 2–3. 126. Jacques de Vitry, The Exempla or Illustrative Stories from the Sermones Vulgares, ed. Thomas F. Crane, nos. 226 and 229 (London: Folk-lore Society, 1890), 94–95. 127. Athelston: A Middle English Romance, vv. 253–96, ed. A. McI. Trounce, EETS o.s. 224 (London: Oxford University Press, 1951), 75–76.

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128. Distaff Gospels, 96–97. 129. Caroline Walker Bynum, “Jesus as Mother and Abbot as Mother: Some Themes in Twelfth-Century Cistercian Writing,” in Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 110–69. 130. Hugo Rahner, “Die Gottesgeburt: Die Lehre der Kirchenväter von der Geburt Christi im Herzen des Gläubigen,” Zeitschrift für katholische Theologie 59 (1935): 333–418. 131. Origen, Homilien zu Exodus 10.3–4, in Homilien zum Hexateuch in Rufins Überset­ zung, ed. W. A. Baehrens, GCS, Origenes Werke 6 (Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs, 1920), 248, 250. The biblical citation is from a version of the Vetus Latina. 132. Ambrose, Expositio Evangelii secundum Lucam 10.24–25 (PL 15:1810bc). 133. Plato, Theaetetus 149–51, trans. Harold North Fowler (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961), 31–39. 134. Augustine, Sermo 191 in Natali Domini, 8.3.4 (PL 38:1011). 135. Augustine, De sancta virginitate 3.3 (PL 40:398). 136. Augustine, Sermo IV de Natali Domini (PL 46:982). 137. Speculum virginum III, ed. Jutta Seyfarth, CCCM 5 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1990), 64. 138. Guerric d’Igny, Deuxième Sermon pour l’Annonciation 5, in Sermons, ed. John Morson and Hilary Costello, trans. Placide Deseille, SC 202, 2 vols. (Paris: Cerf, 1970–73), 2:140–42. 139. Yves Congar, “Modèle monastique et modèle sacerdotal en Occident de Grégoire VII (1073–1085) à Innocent III (1198),” in his Études d’ecclésiologie médiévale (1974; London: Variorum Reprints, 1983), 159. 140. Caesarius of Heisterbach, Dialogus miraculorum 9.32, ed. Joseph Strange, 2 vols. (Cologne: Heberle, 1851), 2:189. 141. Das Gnaden­Leben des Friedrich Sunder, ed. Siegfried Ringler, Viten­ und Offenba­ rungsliteratur in Frauenklöstern des Mittelalters (Munich: Artemis, 1980), 414. 142. Venter can also mean stomach, while mens can mean memory. So the axiom venter mens dicitur could also refer to the memory as a storehouse for useful thoughts, just as the belly is for foods. Mary  J. Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 165. 143. Hadewijch, Mengeldichten, ed. J. van Mierlo (Antwerp: N.V. Standaard-Boekhandel, 1952), 65–71; The Complete Works, trans. Columba Hart (New York: Paulist, 1980), 345–50. 144. On gender in Hadewijch see Barbara Newman, “La mystique courtoise: ThirteenthCentury Beguines and the Art of Love,” in From Virile Woman to WomanChrist: Studies in Me­ dieval Religion and Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), 137–67, and “The Beguine as Knight of Love: Hadewijch’s Stanzaic Poems,” in God and the Goddesses: Vision, Poetry, and Belief in the Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 169–81. 145. Annette Volfing, “Ever-Growing Desire: Spiritual Pregnancy in Hadewijch and in Middle High German Mystics,” in Desire in Dante and the Middle Ages, ed. Manuele Gragnolati et al. (London: Legenda, 2012), 52. 146. Ibid., 54. 147. A fine treatment of Eckhart is Bernard McGinn, The Harvest of Mysticism in Medieval Germany (1300–1500) (New York: Crossroad, 2005), 94–194, especially 164–81. 148. Meister Eckhart, Sermon 6, “Justi vivent in aeternum,” in Meister Eckhart: The Essen­ tial Sermons, Commentaries, Treatises, and Defense, trans. Edmund Colledge and Bernard McGinn (New York: Paulist, 1981), 187. 149. Meister Eckhart, Sermon 22, “Ave, gratia plena,” in ibid., 195–96.

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150. Meister Eckhart, Sermon 2, “Intravit Jesus in quoddam castellum,” in ibid., 177–79. For more on this theme see Amy Hollywood, The Soul as Virgin Wife: Mechthild of Magdeburg, Marguerite Porete, and Meister Eckhart (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995), 145–72. 151. Galloway, “Intellectual Pregnancy, Metaphysical Femininity,” 127. 152. Rosemary Drage Hale, “Imitatio Mariae: Motherhood Motifs in Devotional Memoirs,” Mystics Quarterly 16 (1990): 193–203. 153. Vita Ven. Idae Lovaniensis 1.31, ed. D. Papebroeck, AASS Apr., vol. 2 (Paris: Palmé, 1866), 166; Ida the Eager of Louvain, trans. Martinus Cawley (Lafayette, OR: Guadalupe Translations, 2000), 26–27. 154. Ibid. 3.10, AASS 184; Ida the Eager, 78. 155. Many such visions are described by Hale, “Imitatio Mariae.” 156. Vita Ven. Idae Lovaniensis 2.16–21, AASS 175–76; Ida the Eager, 50–55. 157. The early modern surgeon Jacques Guillemeau also knew of an eye exam for pregnancy: “In the second month her eyes are sunken and dull, the pupil contracted, the eyelids slack, bruised and limp, the veins in the corner of the eye fuller and more swollen than normal. . . . If you have no other way of telling if a woman is pregnant, the eyes will show you.” De l’ heureux accouchement des femmes (Paris: Nicolas Buon, 1609), 7; cited in Gélis, History of Childbirth, 47. I personally know a woman whose early pregnancy was detected by a stranger looking into her eyes in a grocery line. 158. Piroska Nagy, “Sharing Charismatic Authority by Body and Emotions: The Marvellous Life of Lukardis von Oberweimar (c. 1262–1309),” in Mulieres religiosae: Shaping Female Spiri­ tual Authority in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods, ed. Veerle Fraeters and Imke de Gier (Turnhout: Brepols, 2014), 109–26. 159. “Vita Venerabilis Lukardis,” c. 43, Analecta Bollandiana 18 (1899), 333–34. 160. Leben und Geschichte der Christina Ebner, Klosterfrau zu Engelthal, ed. Georg W. K. Lochner (Nuremberg: Recknagel, 1872), 15. 161. Rosemary Drage Hale, “Rocking the Cradle: Margaretha Ebner (Be)Holds the Divine,” in Performance and Transformation: New Approaches to Late Medieval Spirituality, ed. Mary A. Suydam and Joanna E. Ziegler (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), 215. See also Richard Kieckhefer, “Ihesus ist unser!: The Christ Child in the German Sister Books,” in The Christ Child in Medieval Culture: Alpha est et O!, ed. Mary Dzon and Theresa M. Kenney (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012), 167–98. 162. Mechthild of Hackeborn and the Nuns of Helfta, The Book of Special Grace 1.5, trans. Barbara Newman (New York: Paulist, 2017), 44. 163. Die Offenbarungen der Adelheid Langmann, Klosterfrau zu Engelthal, ed. Philipp Strauch (Strassburg: Trübner, 1878), 66–67. 164. For examples see Krone und Schleier: Kunst aus mittelalterlichen Frauenklöstern, ed. Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Bonn, and Ruhrlandmuseum Essen (Munich: Hirmer, 2005), 457–59. 165. Margaret Ebner, Revelations, in Major Works, trans. Leonard P. Hindsley (New York: Paulist, 1993), 134. This Jesuskindlein can still be seen in the treasury of Maria Medingen. 166. Offenbarungen, ed. Philipp Strauch, in Margaretha Ebner und Heinrich von Nördlin­ gen: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der deutschen Mystik (1882; repr. Amsterdam: Schippers, 1966), 87. My translation; cf. Major Works, 132. 167. Nicole R. Rice, “ ‘Temples to Christ’s Indwelling’: Forms of Chastity in a Barking Abbey Manuscript,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 19 (2010): 115–32. On the marital status of

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nuns, see Sarah McNamer, Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medieval Compassion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 25–57. 168. On Dorothea see Richard Kieckhefer, Unquiet Souls: Fourteenth­Century Saints and Their Religious Milieu (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 22–33; Dyan Elliott, “Authorizing a Life: The Collaboration of Dorothea of Montau and John Marienwerder,” in Gendered Voices: Medieval Saints and Their Interpreters, ed. Catherine M. Mooney (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 168–91; and David Wallace, “Borderline Sanctity: Dorothea of Montau, 1347–1394,” in Strong Women: Life, Text, and Territory, 1347–1645 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 1–60. 169. Johannes Marienwerder, Liber de festis: Offenbarungen der Dorothea von Montau, c. 53, ed. Annaliese Triller (Cologne: Böhlau, 1992), 87. 170. Johannes Marienwerder, Das Leben der heiligen Dorothea 3.3, ed. Max Töppen (Leipzig: Hirzel, 1863), 286. 171. Günter Grass, Der Butt (Darmstadt: Luchterhand, 1977); The Flounder, trans. Ralph Manheim (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978); Wallace, Strong Women, 48–52. 172. On Birgitta’s relationships with her children and maternal imagery, see Atkinson, The Oldest Vocation, 170–84. 173. Birgitta of Sweden, Revelations [Liber caelestis] 6.88, in The Revelations of St. Birgitta of Sweden, trans. Denis Searby and Bridget Morris, 3 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006–12), 3:155. 174. Ibid., 1.43 and 1.20; pp. 1:126, 1:85. 175. Claire  L. Sahlin, “ ‘A Marvelous and Great Exultation of the Heart’: Mystical Pregnancy and Marian Devotion in Bridget of Sweden’s Revelations,” in Studies in St. Birgitta and the Brigittine Order, ed. James Hogg (Salzburg: Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 1993), 116. 176. Birgitta of Sweden, Den Heliga Birgittas Reuelaciones Extrauagantes, c. 63, ed. Lennart Hollman (Uppsala: Almqvist och Wiksells, 1956), 185. 177. Margareta Clausdotter (d. 1486), “Chronicon de genere et nepotibus S. Birgittae,” in Scriptores rerum Svecicarum medii aevi, vol. 3, pt. 2, ed. Claes Annerstedt (Uppsala: Berling, 1871–76), 209–10; cited in Atkinson, The Oldest Vocation, 174. 178. On the basis of later Birgittine sources, it has long been thought that Karl was engaged at the time of his death in an affair with Queen Johanna of Naples. But as Elizabeth Casteen has recently shown, there is no contemporary evidence for this. From She­Wolf to Martyr: The Reign and Disputed Reputation of Johanna I of Naples (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015), 167–74. 179. Birgitta, Revelations 7.13, p. 3:228. 180. Ibid. 6.88, pp. 3:155–56. 181. Sahlin, “ ‘A Marvelous and Great Exultation,’ ” 119. 182. Kieckhefer, Unquiet Souls, 32. 183. For Dorothea’s burned breasts see Atkinson, The Oldest Vocation, 186. 184. See Wallace, Strong Women, 18–21, for Dorothea as Griselda. 185. Barbara Newman, “ ‘Crueel Corage’: Child Sacrifice and the Maternal Martyr in Hagiography and Romance,” in From Virile Woman to WomanChrist, 76–107; Almut Suerbaum, “ ‘O wie gar wundirbar ist dis wibes sterke!’ Discourses of Sex, Gender, and Desire in Johannes Marienwerder’s Life of Dorothea von Montau,” Oxford German Studies 39 (2010): 181–97. 186. Marienwerder, Das Leben 1.21, p. 218. 187. “Si sancta Brigitta non expressisset in suo corde et utero fetum vivum apparuisse et se hinc inde movisse, tu adhuc non debuisses hoc de te consimile manifestasse. Attamen tu jam plus

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de hoc quam ipsa expressisti. Ego eciam plus cor tuum et uterum quam ejus magnificavi.” Johannes Marienwerder, “Aus dem Septililium venerabilis domine Dorothee,” bk. 1, chap. 17, ed. Max Töppen, in Scriptores rerum Prussicarum 2 (Leipzig: Hirzel, 1863), 365. 188. Atkinson, The Oldest Vocation, 184; Kieckhefer, Unquiet Souls, 45; Wallace, Strong Women, 3. 189. Marienwerder, Liber de festis c. 100, p. 173. 190. Johannes Marienwerder, Vita Dorotheae Montoviensis [Vita Latina] 4.33bc, ed. Hans Westpfahl (Cologne: Böhlau, 1964), 198. 191. Ibid. 5.7e, p. 221. 192. Ibid. 4.37b, p. 206. 193. Ibid. 4.17d, p. 174. 194. Ibid. 6.21, pp. 319–20. 195. On their collaboration see Elliott, “Authorizing a Life.” 196. Barbara Newman, “Indwelling: A Meditation on Empathy, Pregnancy, and the Virgin Mary,” in Studies on Medieval Empathies, ed. Karl F. Morrison and Rudolph M. Bell (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013), 189–212. 197. Robert M. Berchman, From Philo to Origen: Middle Platonism in Transition (Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1984); David T. Runia, Philo in Early Christian Literature: A Survey (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993); idem, Philo and the Church Fathers: A Collection of Papers (Leiden: Brill, 1995). 198. The New Oxford Annotated Bible: New Revised Standard Version with the Apocrypha, ed. Bruce M. Metzger and Roland E. Murphy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 772. In English Bibles the verse is Psalm 110:3. 199. Shannon McAlister, God the Mother? God the Daughter? The Medieval Question (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, forthcoming), chap. 1. I thank Professor McAlister for permission to cite her work before publication. 200. Ibid., Part 2. 201. Ronald E. Surtz, “The Privileging of the Feminine in the Trinity Sermon of Mother Juana de la Cruz,” in Women’s Voices and the Politics of the Spanish Empire: From Convent Cell to Imperial Court, ed. Jennifer Lee Eich, Jeanne Gillespie, and Lucia G. Harrison (New Orleans: University Press of the South, 2008), 90. I thank Professor Surtz for sharing his transcription of the unedited manuscript. This Juana de la Cruz should not be confused with the more famous Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz of Mexico (1648–95). 202. Julian of Norwich, A Revelation of Love, chap. 58, in The Writings of Julian of Norwich, ed. Nicholas Watson and Jacqueline Jenkins (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006), 309. 203. Ibid., chap. 68, pp. 335–37. 204. For example, the Carthusian prioress Marguerite d’Oingt (d. 1310) exclaimed, “Sweet Lord Jesus Christ, who ever saw a mother suffer such a birth! For when the hour of your delivery came, you were placed on the hard bed of the cross . . . and your nerves and all your veins were ruptured. And surely it was no wonder if your veins burst when you gave birth to the whole world in a single day.” Pagina meditationum 36, in Les oeuvres de Marguerite d’Oingt, ed. and trans. Antonin Duraffour, Pierre Gardette, and Paulette Durdilly (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1965), 78. 205. Julian, A Revelation of Love, chap. 60, p. 313. 206. Ibid., chap. 57, p. 305. 207. See Andrew Sprung, “ ‘We nevyr shall come out of hym’: Enclosure and Immanence in Julian of Norwich’s Book of Showings,” Mystics Quarterly 19 (1993): 47–62.

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208. Julian, A Revelation of Love, chap. 60, pp. 313–15. 209. Ibid., 313. 210. Ibid., chap. 11, pp. 163–65. 211. She does seem to have been educated in a convent school, as her use of the phrase Benedicite/Dominus suggests (A Revelation of Love, chap. 4, p. 135). This is a routine greeting exchanged by junior and senior nuns (or monks) whenever they chanced to meet: “Bless me” with the response, “The Lord [bless you].” Many upper-class girls were educated in nunneries without taking religious vows. 212. Sister Benedicta [Ward], “Julian the Solitary,” in Julian Reconsidered, ed. Kenneth Leech and Sister Benedicta (Oxford: Sisters of the Love of God Press, 1988), 11–29. See also Santha Bhattacharji, “Julian of Norwich (1342–c. 1416),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), online version of 29 May 2014. https://doi.org /10.1093 /ref:odnb/15163. 213. Mara  H. Benjamin, The Obligated Self: Maternal Subjectivity and Jewish Thought (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2018), xiv. 214. Zoe Chamberlain, “Woman, 40, has ‘miracle’ baby after suffering ten miscarriages and trying IVF,” Mirror, 3 April 2019. https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/woman-40-miracle -baby-after-14231262. Accessed 4 April 2019. 215. Ally Opfer, “Love What Matters.” https://www.lovewhatmatters.com/i-found-out-i -was-pregnant-30-minutes-before-my-miracle-baby-was-born/. Accessed 4 April 2019. 216. Lucia I. Suarez Sang, “Miracle baby girl is born on top of a mango tree during Mozambique cyclone,” Fox News, 3 April  2019. https://www.foxnews.com/world/miracle-baby-girl-is -born-on-top-of-a-mango-tree-during-mozambique-cyclone. Accessed 4 April 2019. 217. Ciara Nugent, “What It Was Like to Grow Up as the World’s First ‘Test-Tube Baby,’ ” Time magazine, 25 July 2018. http://time.com/5344145/louise-brown-test-tube-baby/, accessed 4 April 2019. 218. “Surrogacy Laws by Country,” Wikipedia, accessed 3 August 2020.

Chapter 5. God and the Devil 1. “Sappie che, tosto che l’anima trade / come fec’ïo, il corpo suo l’è tolto / da un demonio, che poscia il governa / mentre che’l tempo suo tutto sia vòlto.” Dante, Inferno 33.129–32. 2. Marguerite Porete, Le mirouer des simples ames, ed. Romana Guarnieri, with facing-page Latin translation, Speculum simplicium animarum, ed. Paul Verdeyen, CCCM 69 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1986). I here overlook the question of whether, or how far, Marguerite identified herself with the Free Soul, the protagonist of her dialogue. 3. Rosalynn Voaden, God’s Words, Women’s Voices: The Discernment of Spirits in the Writing of Late­Medieval Women Visionaries (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell/York Medieval Press, 1999); Cornelius Roth, Discretio spirituum: Kriterien geistlicher Unterscheidung bei Johannes Gerson (Würzburg: Echter, 2001); Nancy Caciola, Discerning Spirits: Divine and Demonic Possession in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003); Dyan Elliott, Proving Woman: Female Spirituality and Inquisitional Culture in the Later Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004); Moshe Sluhovsky, Believe Not Every Spirit: Possession, Mysticism, and Discernment in Early Modern Catholicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); Wendy Love Anderson, The Discernment of Spirits: Assessing Visions and Visionaries in the Late Middle Ages (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2011).

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4. I borrow this term from Fabián Alejandro Campagne, “Demonology at a Crossroads: The Visions of Ermine de Reims and the Image of the Devil on the Eve of the Great European Witch-Hunt,” Church History 80 (2011): 470. 5. Barbara Newman, “Annihilation and Authorship: Three Women Mystics of the 1290s,” Speculum 91 (2016): 591–630. 6. For parallels, see Caciola, Discerning Spirits, and Peter Dinzelbacher, Heilige oder Hexen? Schicksale auffälliger Frauen in Mittelalter und Frühneuzeit (Zurich: Artemis und Winkler, 1995). For some cautions about Dinzelbacher’s argument see Richard Kieckhefer, “The Holy and the Unholy: Sainthood, Witchcraft, and Magic in Late Medieval Europe,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 24 (1994): 355–85. 7. Porete, Le mirouer des simples ames, chap. 6, p. 24, and chap. 21, p. 82; Sean L. Field, The Beguine, the Angel, and the Inquisitor: The Trials of Marguerite Porete and Guiard of Cressonessart (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012), 198. 8. This is the tenth condemned proposition in the bull In agro Dominico (1329); Heinrich Denzinger and Adolf Schönmetzer, eds., Enchiridion symbolorum, definitionum et declaratio­ num de rebus fidei et morum, 33rd ed. (Freiburg: Herder, 1965), 292. The source is Meister Eckhart’s sixth German sermon, “Iusti vivent in aeternum,” in Deutsche Werke 1, ed. Joseph Quint (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1936), 110–11. 9. Brian P. Levack, The Devil Within: Possession and Exorcism in the Christian West (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 196–97. 10. Ibid., 198; Sluhovsky, Believe Not Every Spirit, 62. 11. Jean Le Breton, Deffense de la vérité touchant la possession des religieuses de Louviers (Évreux: Nicolas Hamillon, 1643), as cited in Michel de Certeau, The Possession at Loudun, trans. Michael B. Smith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 38. 12. Athanasius of Alexandria, The Life of Antony, trans. Tim Vivian and Apostolos N. Athanassakis (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 2003); Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints, trans. William Granger Ryan, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 1:93–96. 13. Bosch’s famous triptych The Temptation of St. Anthony (ca. 1501), hangs in the Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga in Lisbon, with copies in São Paolo (Brazil), Ottawa, Madrid, and Philadelphia. The single panel shown here (Fig. 8), by Bosch or a follower, is in the Museo del Prado, Madrid. 14. Lennard J. Davis, Obsession: A History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 33. 15. “Diagnostic Criteria for Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder” (300.3), Diagnostic and Statis­ tical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (Arlington, VA: American Psychiatric Association, 2013). http://beyondocd.org/information-for-individuals/clinical-definition-of-ocd, accessed 27 August 2019. 16. Gabriele Amorth, An Exorcist Explains the Demonic: The Antics of Satan and His Army of Fallen Angels, ed. Stefano Stimamiglio, trans. Charlotte J. Fasi (Manchester, NH: Sophia Institute Press, 2016), 72–73. 17. Augustine, De Genesi ad litteram libri duodecim, 12.12–13, ed. Joseph Zycha, CSEL 28/1 (Vienna: Tempsky, 1894), 395–98. “Spiritual” and “imaginative” visions are synonymous terms for Augustine; I have used the latter because it is clearer to modern readers. 18. In the early Christian era, demons had bodies, but they were reconceived as incorporeal in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries: Dyan Elliott, Fallen Bodies: Pollution, Sexuality, and Demonology in the Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 128–35.

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19. Heinrich von Langenstein, De discretione spirituum, c. 2, in Heinrichs von Langenstein “Unterscheidung der Geister,” lateinisch und deutsch, ed. Thomas Hohmann (Munich: Artemis, 1977), 58–60. 20. Caciola, Discerning Spirits, 296. 21. See especially Gendered Voices: Medieval Saints and Their Interpreters, ed. Catherine M. Mooney (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), and John W. Coakley, Women, Men, and Spiritual Power: Female Saints and Their Male Collaborators (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006). 22. There is little work on Richalm, but see Norman Cohn, Europe’s Inner Demons: An Enquiry Inspired by the Great Witch­Hunt (London: Chatto and Heinemann, 1975), 71–74, and Jean-Claude Schmitt, “Demons and the Emotions,” in Tears, Sighs and Laughter: Expressions of Emotions in the Middle Ages, ed. Per Förnegård, Erika Kihlman, Mia Åkestam, and Gunnel Engwall (Stockholm: Kungl. Vitterhets historie och antikvitets akademien, 2017), 40–63. 23. Richalm of Schöntal, Liber revelationum, ed. Paul Gerhard Schmidt, MGH Quellen zur Geistesgeschichte des Mittelalters, vol. 24 (Hannover: Hahnsche Buchhandlung, 2009), c. 31, p. 35; c. 61, p. 74. 24. Ibid., c. 36, p. 44. 25. Ibid., c. 84, p. 101. Remarkably, the Vatican exorcist Fr. Amorth says much the same: “When the possession [of a soul] is multiple, it has to do with spirits that are organized hierarchically, precisely like a military body: there are chiefs, deputy chiefs, and simple soldiers. Each one is provided with a different authority.” An Exorcist Explains the Demonic, 68–69. 26. Richalm, Liber revelationum, c. 99, p. 119. 27. Ibid., c. 24, p. 30; cf. c. 65, p. 80. 28. Ibid., c. 48, p. 59; c. 63, p. 76; c. 79, p. 98; c. 95, p. 115. 29. Ibid., c. 52, p. 64. 30. Ibid., c. 19, p. 25; cc. 63–64, pp. 75–78; c. 84, p. 102; c. 102, pp. 123–24. 31. Ibid., c. 119, pp. 145–46. 32. Ibid., c. 52, p. 63; c. 55, p. 67; c. 64, pp. 76–77. 33. Ibid., c. 52, pp. 63–64. 34. Ibid., xvii. 35. Ibid., c. 54, p. 65. 36. Ibid., c. 52, p. 64. 37. Ibid., c. 53, p. 65. 38. Ibid., c. 73, p. 92. 39. Ibid., c. 8, p. 16. 40. Ibid., c. 10, p. 17. 41. Ibid., c. 29, p. 33. 42. Ibid., c. 16, p. 22. 43. Ibid., c. 23, p. 28. 44. Ibid., p. 29. 45. Ibid., c. 15, pp. 21–22. 46. Ibid., c. 69, p. 84. 47. Schmitt, “Demons and the Emotions,” 59. 48. Caesarius of Heisterbach, Dialogus miraculorum 5.5, ed. Joseph Strange, 2 vols. (Cologne: J. M. Heberle, 1851), 1:281–85. 49. Richalm, Liber revelationum, c. 26, pp. 31–32.

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50. Thomas of Cantimpré, Bonum universale de apibus 2.57, par. 24, ed. Georges Colvénère (Douai: Beller, 1627). 51. Alexander Murray, “Demons as Psychological Abstractions,” in Angels in Medieval Phil­ osophical Inquiry: Their Function and Significance, ed. Isabel Iribarren and Martin Lenz (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 182–84. 52. Richalm, Liber revelationum, c. 94, pp. 113–14. 53. Ibid., xxvi; Jean-Paul Sartre, Huis clos [1944], suivi de Les mouches (Paris: Gallimard, 2004). 54. Richalm, Liber revelationum, c. 103, p. 124. 55. Ibid., c. 38, p. 46. 56. Ibid., c. 159, p. 181. 57. Ibid., prologue, p. 3. 58. Ibid., xlix–lx. 59. Peter of Dacia, Vita Christinae Stumbelensis, ed. Johannes Paulson, Scriptores Latini Medii Aevi Suecani (Göteborg: Wettergren och Kerber, 1896); account cited, 3–8. On the sole manuscript (Aachen, Bischöfliches Diözesanarchiv ms. 599, formerly kept at Jülich), see Peter Nieveler, Codex Iuliacensis: Christina von Stommeln und Petrus von Dacien, ihr Leben und Nachleben in Geschichte, Kunst und Literatur (Mönchengladbach: Kühlen, 1975). A later, more readable edition by Isak Collijn contains some additional material, but it presents a humanist reworking of the original manuscript from 1635: Vita  B. Christinae Stumbelensis (Uppsala: Almqvist och Wiksells, 1936). 60. The scholarship on Peter and Christine is limited. Aside from a few Swedish works, the most comprehensive study is Christine Ruhrberg, Der literarische Körper der Heiligen: Leben und Viten der Christina von Stommeln (1242–1312) (Tübingen: Francke, 1995). The best accounts in English are Aviad M. Kleinberg, Prophets in Their Own Country: Living Saints and the Making of Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 40–98, and John W. Coakley, “Self and Saint: Peter of Dacia on Christine of Stommeln,” in Women, Men, and Spiritual Power, 89–110. 61. Vita Christinae, 111–12. 62. Cf. Kleinberg: “Peter apparently saw Christina as first and foremost a patient victim, a genuine martyr. . . . The more horrible the torments the more striking the martyr’s equanimity.” Prophets in Their Own Country, 59. 63. Monika Asztalos, “Petrus de Dacia,” https://wikihost.uib.no/medieval/index.php /Petrus _de _ Dacia, accessed 3 April 2020. 64. Vita Christinae, prologue, 2. 65. See Coakley, Women, Men, and Spiritual Power. 66. Vita Christinae, prologue, 2. 67. Ibid., first visit, 8. 68. After studying with Thomas Aquinas in 1269–70, Peter wrote and elaborately glossed a scholastic poem on virtue and sanctity, supposedly about Christine, though it bears little resemblance to her reported experiences. See his De naturam gratia ditante, sive De virtutibus Christi­ nae Stumbelensis, ed. Monika Asztalos (Stockholm: Almqvist och Wiksell, 1982). 69. Susanne Fritsch-Staar, “ ‘Uterus virgineus thronus est eburneus’: Zur Ästhetisierung, Dämonisierung und Metaphorisierung des Uterus in mhd. Lyrik,” in Manlîchiu wîp, wîplich man: Zur Konstruktion der Kategorien “Körper” und “Geschlecht” in der deutschen Literatur des Mittelalters, ed. Ingrid Bennewitz and Helmut Tervooren (Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1999), 186–87. For this episode see Vita Christinae, 14, and Kleinberg, Prophets in Their Own Country, 89–90.

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70. Kleinberg, Prophets in Their Own Country, 77. 71. Vita Christinae, fourth visit, 19–22. 72. Ibid., seventh visit, 31–33. 73. For further evidence see Coakley, “Self and Saint.” 74. On this literary mode see Barbara Newman, Making Love in the Twelfth Century: “Let­ ters of Two Lovers” in Context (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 10–24. 75. Vita Christinae, Epistle 20, 142. 76. Ibid., Epistle 21, 149. 77. Ibid., 109–31. 78. Ibid., 114. On the general pattern see Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), chapters 6–7, and Rudolph M. Bell, Holy Anorexia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985). 79. Vita Christinae, 129. 80. For the expectation that rape victims would experience plea sure, see Elliott, Fallen Bod­ ies, 48. 81. Vita Christinae, Epistle 7, 85. 82. Ibid., 86. 83. Ibid., tenth visit, 53–54. 84. Ibid., ninth visit, 42. 85. Ibid., 47. 86. Kleinberg, Prophets in Their Own Country, 66. 87. Vita Christinae, Epistle 7, 87; fourteenth visit, 107; fifteenth visit, 157–58. Peter consistently portrays Christine as the bride of Christ, but it is clear from her own letters that Peter himself is her beloved. 88. Coakley, “Self and Saint,” 110. 89. Vita Christinae, Epistle 29, 208. 90. Kleinberg, Prophets in Their Own Country, 93–94. 91. Acta  B. Christinae Stumbelensis, auctore anonymo, AASS Jun., vol. 5 (Paris: Palmé, 1867), 367–87. 92. Ibid., 387. 93. Michael Hastings’s 1984 play, Tom and Viv (New York: Viking Penguin, 1985), offers this speculation about T. S. Eliot’s troubled first wife, Vivienne Haigh-Wood. See also Margaret Altemus, “Hormone-Specific Psychiatric Disorders: Do They Exist?” Archives of Women’s Mental Health 13 (2010): 25–26. The disorder under study is PMDD, premenstrual dysphoric disorder. 94. Vita Christinae, Epistle 52, 256. 95. As a performance artist, Christine might be compared with Elisabeth of Spalbeek, who ended her run of athletic Passion performances in her mid-20s. The contemporary performance artist Marina Abramović, known for her intense spirituality, also began her career with spectacular performances of self-mutilation. 96. S. J. Rachman, The Treatment of Obsessions (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 15. 97. Jean Le Graveur, Entre Dieu et Satan: Les visions d’Ermine de Reims (†1396), ed. and trans. Claude Arnaud-Gillet (Florence: SISMEL—Edizioni del Galluzzo, 1997), 21–22. 98. The text is clearly addressed to laity, including the illiterate: “Touz ceulz et celles qui ce livret verront ou orront, que ilz le lisent ou escoutent en bonne charité.” Ibid., prologue, 49. 99. Ibid., 24–27. The translator was Jean de Balay, subprior of Saint-Denis of Reims.

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100. Extended family could be called amis charnels or parens et amis. The Ménagier de Paris (ca. 1392–94), contemporary with Jean Le Graveur’s text, refers to mes amis qui sont de mon sang et de ma char: ed. Société des bibliophiles français (Paris: Crapelet, 1846), 32. Cf. Anita GuerreauJalabert, “Flesh and Blood in Medieval Language About Kinship,” in Blood and Kinship: Matter for Metaphor from Ancient Rome to the Present, ed. Christopher H. Johnson, Bernhard Jussen, David Warren Sabean, and Simon Teuscher (New York: Berghahn, 2013), 61–82. 101. Jean Le Graveur, Entre Dieu et Satan, 50. 102. Ibid., 51. 103. Ibid. 104. Ibid., 52, 53. 105. Ibid., 53. 106. Ibid. 107. Ibid., prologue, 48–49. 108. Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski, The Strange Case of Ermine de Reims: A Medieval Woman Between Demons and Saints (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 29. 109. Jean Le Graveur, Entre Dieu et Satan, 71. 110. Ibid. 111. The Book of Margery Kempe, chaps. 21–22, ed. Lynn Staley (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute, 1996), 58–62. Christ tells Kempe, “I lofe the as wel as any mayden in the world” (59), and “forasmech as thu art a mayden in thi sowle, I schal take the be the on hand in hevyn and my modyr be the other hand, and so schalt thu dawnsyn in hevyn wyth other holy maydens and virgynes” (62). 112. Jean Le Graveur, Entre Dieu et Satan, 99. One of Ermine’s deceased friends returns with a message for Jean: she should tell him that no one is ever damned for clothing or dancing, so he should not blame women so much for them. 113. That is how I interpret the suggestion of a faux angel: “Moult y a de bonnes dames par le monde qui vont par les pardons, querans leur pain pour l’amour de Dieu; mais tu as cy toutes tes aises . . . va t’en doncques par les pays, querans les pardons, et puis revenras cy aucunefois pour voir tes amis.” Ibid., 74. In Brittany, the most conservative part of France, professional pilgrims survived until the late nineteenth century; the last one, Marguerite Philippe, died in 1909. MaryAnn Constantine, Breton Ballads (Aberystwyth: CMCS Publications, 1996), 38–39. 114. Jean Le Graveur, Entre Dieu et Satan, 53–54. Jean also discussed Ermine’s visions with Henri de Mareuil and Jean Morel, canons of the nearby Saint-Denis. It was Morel who first approached Gerson (16–17). 115. Ibid., 55. 116. Ibid., 66–67. 117. Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Strange Case, 114. 118. Letter from Jean Gerson to Jean Morel, in Jean Le Graveur, Entre Dieu et Satan, 173. 119. Jean Le Graveur, Entre Dieu et Satan, prologue, 48. 120. Ibid., 60. 121. Ibid., 71. 122. Ibid., 144. 123. Ibid., 58, 64. See also 76, 80, 91, 130, 140, 147, 159, 160, 162. 124. Anderson, The Discernment of Spirits, 1. 125. Jean Le Graveur, Entre Dieu et Satan, 126. Cf. 133, 134, 142, 151. 126. Ibid., 59. 127. Ibid., 61, 106, 131. 128. Ibid., 91, 123–24.

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129. Ibid., 98. 130. Ibid., 158–59. 131. Ibid., 48, 135. 132. Ibid., 127–28. 133. Ibid., 112. 134. Ibid., 85–86. 135. Ibid., 110–11. 136. Ibid., 112. 137. Ibid., 60. 138. Ibid., 70. 139. Ibid., 75. 140. Ibid., 81. 141. Ibid., 52, 144. 142. Jean Gerson, “De distinctione verarum revelationum a falsis,” in Oeuvres complètes, ed. Palémon Glorieux, vol. 3 (Paris: Desclée, 1962), 43–44. 143. Jean Gerson, “De examinatione doctrinarum,” in Oeuvres complètes, ed. Palémon Glorieux, vol. 9 (Paris: Desclée, 1973), 474. 144. Jean Le Graveur, Entre Dieu et Satan, 58–59. 145. Ibid., 62. 146. Ibid., 112–13. 147. See Chapter 2, “Hidden Sins: Mind Reading and the Confessional.” On the sexual iconography of toads and serpents, see Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Strange Case, 116–21, and Fritsch-Staar, “Uterus virgineus.” 186–87. In the seventeenth century, a shrine in Lorraine sold toad statuettes as ex-votos for those cured of demonic possession: Sluhovsky, Believe Not Every Spirit, 59. 148. Jean Le Graveur, Entre Dieu et Satan, 130. 149. Ibid., 144. 150. Ibid., 57. 151. Ibid., 140. 152. Ibid., 73. 153. Ibid., 130. 154. Ibid., 122. 155. Ibid., 153. 156. Ibid. 157. Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Strange Case, 99. 158. Campagne, “Demonology at a Crossroads,” 492. 159. Jean Le Graveur, Entre Dieu et Satan, 82–83, 108, 112. 160. Claude Arnaud-Gillet, introduction to Jean Le Gaveur, Entre Dieu et Satan, 18–20; André Vauchez, “Un réformateur religieux dans la France de Charles VI: Jean de Varennes (†1396?),” Académie des inscriptions et belles­lettres, Comptes rendus (Paris, 1998): 1111–30. 161. Jean Le Graveur, Entre Dieu et Satan, 116. 162. Ibid., 162. 163. Ibid., 158, 162. 164. Ibid., 155. 165. Ibid., 92–95; the whole episode is translated in Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Strange Case, 168–70. 166. Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Strange Case, 124; cf. Campagne, “Demonology at a Crossroads,” 493.

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167. Jean Le Graveur, Entre Dieu et Satan, 164. 168. St. Anthony himself appears only once, in demonic form, and offers to help Ermine fight her demons “ because,” he says, “I’m more powerful than the subprior.” Ibid., 100. 169. On this little-known saint see “Venerable Paul the Simple of Egypt,” https://www.oca .org /saints/lives/2019/10/04/102866-venerable-paul-the-simple-of-egypt, accessed 21 Sept. 2019. Paul the Simple does not appear in the Golden Legend. 170. Jean Le Graveur, Entre Dieu et Satan, 105. 171. Ibid., 99. 172. Ibid., 116–17, 145, 158. 173. Ibid., 149. 174. Ibid. 175. Ibid., 166. 176. Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Poets, Saints, and Visionaries of the Great Schism, 1378–1417 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006), 89–91; Roth, Discretio spirituum, 203–9. 177. John Bugbee, God’s Patients: Chaucer, Agency, and the Nature of Laws (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2019), 68. 178. Marco Tosatti, Santi indemoniati: Casi straordinari di possessione (Hong Kong: Chorabooks, 2017). 179. Geraldine Heng, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 16, 186. 180. Caciola, Discerning Spirits, 49–54. 181. Gregory the Great, Dialogues 1.4.7, ed. Adalbert de Vogüé, SC 260 (Paris: Cerf, 1979), 42–44. 182. Jean-Joseph Surin, S.J., introduction to The Triumph of Divine Love over the Powers of Hell, in Into the Dark Night and Back: The Mystical Writings of Jean­Joseph Surin, ed. Moshe Sluhovsky, trans. Patricia M. Ranum (Leiden: Brill, 2019), 33. 183. Vita Christinae, fifteenth visit, 155–56. 184. Richard Kieckhefer, Unquiet Souls: Fourteenth­ Century Saints and Their Religious Milieu (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 50–88. 185. This topic has been extensively discussed. See Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast; Elliott, Proving Woman; Mooney, ed., Gendered Voices; Coakley, Women, Men, and Spiritual Power. 186. Jerome, Letter 45 to Asella, in The Sacred Writings of St. Jerome, trans. W. H. Fremantle and Philip Schaff (repr. Altenmünster: Jazzybee, 2012), 61. 187. Vita B. Christinae Stumbelensis, ed. Isak Collijn, 41. 188. Barbara Newman, “Possessed by the Spirit: Devout Women, Demoniacs, and the Apostolic Life in the Thirteenth Century,” Speculum 73 (1998): 753–58. 189. See Chapter 2, “Secret Graces, Special Friendships, and ‘Sending God.’ ” 190. Alain Boureau, Satan the Heretic: The Birth of Demonology in the Medieval West, trans. Teresa Lavender Fagan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 118. 191. In “Possessed by the Spirit,” 763–69, I characterized Christina Mirabilis of Saint-Trond (1150–1224) as a demoniac saint. But her case is a matter of discernment: while many saw her as a demoniac, for Thomas of Cantimpré and others she was a saint. The question raised by Christine of Stommeln and certain seventeenth-century figures is whether a person could be both at once. 192. This summary follows Sluhovsky, “La spiritualité à la mode,” in Believe Not Every Spirit, 97–136. The Mirror of Simple Souls continued to circulate anonymously in Latin, Italian, and possibly French. A study of Porete’s influence on seventeenth-century Quietism is urgently needed.

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193. Miguel de Molinos, Defensa de la contemplación, c. 18, ed. Eulogio Pacho (Madrid: Fundación Universitaria Española, 1988); Sluhovsky, Believe Not Every Spirit, 121. 194. For “trivial” cases see Sluhovsky, Believe Not Every Spirit, 13–32. 195. de Certeau, Possession, 11–13, 24–26. 196. Jean Martin, baron de Laubardemont, cited from manuscript in ibid., 108. 197. de Certeau, Possession, 22. 198. Newman, “Possessed by the Spirit,” 760–61. 199. Soeur Jeanne des Anges, Autobiographie d’une hystérique possédée, ed. Gabriel Legué and Georges Gilles de la Tourette (Paris: Progrès médical, 1866), 76–79; de Certeau, Possession, 30. 200. de Certeau, Possession, 36, 41–42. 201. Ibid., 52–64. A similar case of mass possession among the nuns of Louviers (1643–47) led to the execution of their spiritual director, Thomas Boullé, for alleged satanism: Sluhovsky, Believe Not Every Spirit, 151. 202. de Certeau, Possession, 152–80. 203. Surin’s use of Latin is interesting because Jeanne des Anges had a very imperfect command of it, and in fact denied knowing any Latin at all. This suggests that Surin’s teaching was aimed as much at the demons as at the prioress, although she could be expected to absorb at least some of it. 204. de Certeau, Possession, 213–26. 205. Surin, Triumph of Divine Love, in Into the Dark Night, 44. 206. Ibid., 58. 207. Surin, Letter 52 to Father Achille Doni d’Attichy (1635), in Into the Dark Night, 459. In the epigraph I have deleted an erroneous not from the translation. 208. Sluhovsky, Believe Not Every Spirit, 158.

Conclusion, or Why It Still Matters 1. Timothy J. Reiss, Mirages of the Selfe: Patterns of Personhood in Ancient and Early Modern Europe (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 3. 2. Caroline Walker Bynum, “Did the Twelfth Century Discover the Individual?” in Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 82–109. 3. John W. Coakley, Women, Men, and Spiritual Power: Female Saints and Their Male Col­ laborators (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006). 4. Cicero, Laelius [De amicitia] 20, in De senectute, De amicitia, De divinatione, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964). 5. Studies include Friendship in Medieval Europe, ed. Julian Haseldine (Stroud, U.K.: Sutton, 1999); Brian Patrick McGuire, Friendship and Community: The Monastic Experience, 350– 1250, rev. ed. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010); R. Jacob McDonie, Friendship and Rhetoric in the Middle Ages: The Linguistic Performance of Intimacy from Cicero to Aelred (New York: Routledge, 2020). 6. Jacques Le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984); Robert Bartlett, Why Can the Dead Do Such Great Things? Saints and Worshippers from the Martyrs to the Reformation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013); Nancy Mandeville Caciola, Afterlives: The Return of the Dead in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016).

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7. Okot p’Bitek, Artist, the Ruler: Essays on Art, Culture, and Values (Nairobi: Heinemann Kenya, 1986), 19. 8. Annalese Duprey, “Disciplining the Heart: Love and Pity in Medieval Literature,” Ph.D. dissertation, Northwestern University, 2019. 9. Sarah McNamer, Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medieval Compassion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010). 10. Béatrice Delaurenti, La contagion des émotions: “Compassio,” une énigme médiévale (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2016). 11. Katharine Breen, Machines of the Mind: Personification in Medieval Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021). 12. A. C. Spearing, Medieval Autographies: The “I” of the Text (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012). 13. For some recent examples see Shaping Identity in Medieval France: The Other Within, ed. Adrian P. Tudor and Kristin L. Burr (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2019). 14. For two very different takes on hybridity, see Caroline Walker Bynum, Metamorphosis and Identity (New York: Zone, 2001), and Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Hybridity, Identity, and Mon­ strosity in Medieval Britain: Difficult Middles (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). 15. David N. Bell, Wholly Animals: A Book of Beastly Tales (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1992); David Salter, Holy and Noble Beasts: Encounters with Animals in Medieval Literature (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2001); Dominic Alexander, Saints and Animals in the Middle Ages (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell, 2008) 16. E. Jane Burns, “A Snake-Tailed Woman: Hybridity and Dynasty in the Roman de Mé­ lusine,” in From Beasts to Souls: Gender and Embodiment in Medieval Europe, ed. E. Jane Burns and Peggy McCracken (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013), 185–220; Peggy McCracken, In the Skin of a Beast: Sovereignty and Animality in Medieval France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 97–125. 17. Tanya Marie Luhrmann et al., “Toward an Anthropological Theory of Mind,” Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society 36 (2011): 5–63. 18. Bambi Schieffelin in ibid., 54. 19. Aparecida Vilaça in ibid., 31. Some readers will recognize this theory of mind from the anthropological fictions of Carlos Castañeda, popu lar in the 1970s: The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), with sequels. 20. Michelle Karnes in Luhrmann et al., “Toward an Anthropological Theory of Mind,” 47. See also Karnes, Imagination, Meditation, and Cognition in the Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). 21. Schieffelin in Luhrmann et al., “Toward an Anthropological Theory of Mind,” 54. 22. Joel Robbins in ibid., 15–16. 23. Julia Cassaniti in ibid., 18. 24. Luhrmann in ibid., 7. 25. Giulia Mazza in ibid., 63. 26. Moshe Sluhovsky, Believe Not Every Spirit: Possession, Mysticism, and Discernment in Early Modern Catholicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 28. 27. Dedre Gentner in Luhrmann et al., “Toward an Anthropological Theory of Mind,” 48. 28. Suzanne Gaskins in ibid., 43. 29. Sonya Pritzker in ibid., 56.

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30. Dennis Watkins at the Magic Parlour, Chicago, Halloween 2018. For an interesting comparison of “anthropological” and entertainment magic, see Graham M. Jones, Magic’s Rea­ son: An Anthropology of Analogy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017). 31. F. W. H. Myers, Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death (New York: Longmans, Green, 1903); Emily Williams Kelly, “F.  W.  H. Myers and the Empirical Study of the Mind-Body Problem,” in Irreducible Mind: Toward a Psychology for the 21st  Century, ed. Edward F. Kelly et al. (Plymouth, U.K.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007), 96n30. 32. For James’s work in this field see Krister Dylan Knapp, William James: Psychical Research and the Challenge of Modernity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017), and Andreas Sommer, “James and Psychical Research in Context,” in The Oxford Handbook of William James, ed. Alexander Klein (Oxford: Oxford University Press, published online September 2020; print publication forthcoming), https://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb /9780199395699.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780199395699-e-37, accessed 16 November 2020. 33. The authors are Edward F. Kelly, an experimental psychologist working in the psychology of language and neuroimaging; Emily Williams Kelly and Bruce Greyson, who both study near-death experiences; Adam Crabtree, a psychotherapist; Alan Gauld, a historian of hypnosis; and Michael Grosso, a phi losopher. 34. Edward F. Kelly, “A View from the Mainstream: Contemporary Cognitive Neuroscience and the Consciousness Debates,” in Irreducible Mind, 29–30. 35. See the sequels to Irreducible Mind, entitled Beyond Physicalism: Toward Reconciliation of Science and Spirituality, ed. Edward  F. Kelly, Adam Crabtree, and Paul Marshall (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2015), and Consciousness Unbound: Liberating Mind from the Tyranny of Materialism, ed. Edward F. Kelly and Paul Marshall (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2021). 36. For full documentation see Barbara Newman, “Exchanging Hearts: A Medievalist Looks at Transplant Surgery,” Spiritus 12 (2012): 1–20. 37. Y. Inspector, I. Kutz, and D. David, “Another Person’s Heart: Magical and Rational Thinking in the Psychological Adaptation to Heart Transplantation,” Israel Journal of Psychiatry and Related Sciences 41, no. 3 (2004): 161–73. 38. Renée C. Fox and Judith P. Swazey, Spare Parts: Organ Replacement in American Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); C. Don Keyes, “Body and Self-Identity,” in New Harvest: Transplanting Body Parts and Reaping the Benefits, ed. C. Don Keyes and Walter E. Wiest (Clifton: Humana, 1991), 161–77. 39. Stuart J. Youngner, “Some Must Die,” in Organ Transplantation: Meanings and Reali­ ties, ed. Stuart J. Youngner, Renée C. Fox, and Laurence J. O’Connell (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996), 49. 40. Karl F. Morrison, “I Am You”: The Hermeneutics of Empathy in Western Literature, The­ ology, and Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998). 41. Dennis Patrick Slattery, The Wounded Body: Remembering the Markings of Flesh (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), 7. 42. As Wendy Doniger remarks, “Though it has become physically possible to do such operations only in recent decades, people have imagined, for a very long time indeed, the sorts of problems that might arise if one could do such things.” “Transplanting Myths of Organ Transplants,” in Organ Transplantation, ed. Youngner et al., 195. 43. For a couple that tried to realize the ideal in an actual relationship, with predictably fraught results, see Barbara Newman, Making Love in the Twelfth Century: “Letters of Two Lov­ ers” in Context (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 24–35.

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44. Thomas D. Williams and Jan Olof Bengtsson, “Personalism,” in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward  N. Zalta (Summer 2013 Edition), http://plato.stanford.edu/archives /sum2013/entries/personalism/; Rufus Burrow  Jr., Personalism: A Critical Introduction (St. Louis: Chalice Press, 1999); Jan Olof Bengtsson, The Worldview of Personalism: Origins and Early Development (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 45. Walter Kaufmann, “I and You: A Prologue,” in Martin Buber, I and Thou: A New Trans­ lation (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1970), 15. A translator in 1937 entitled the work I and Thou, which is unfortunate because few English readers realize that thou, like du, once denoted intimacy and singularity. Freud’s translator oddly rendered Das Ich und das Es (The I and the It) in Latin rather than English, giving us the technical terms ego and id. 46. Buber, I and Thou, 111–13. 47. Buber’s meditation on gazing into the eyes of his cat (p. 145) is a source for Denise Levertov’s poem ending with the line “I-Thou, cat, I-Thou,” as well as a famous reflection by Derrida. See Denise Levertov, “The Cat as Cat,” in The Sorrow Dance (New York: New Directions, 1963), 40; Jacques Derrida, “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow),” trans. David Wills, Critical Inquiry 28 (2002): 369–418. 48. Buber, I and Thou, 151, 84. 49. Ibid., 131–37. Buber contrasts his position with a mystical strand of Christianity typified by Eckhart, as well as the Khandogya Upanishad. 50. Ibid., 80. 51. Ibid., 76. 52. Ibid., 179. 53. Carter Heyward, When Boundaries Betray Us: Beyond Illusions of What Is Ethical in Therapy and Life (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1993), 146. 54. Ibid., 77. 55. Ibid., 46, 117. 56. Ibid., 157. 57. Marie M. Fortune, in Heyward and Fortune, “Boundaries or Barriers? An Exchange,” Christian Century 111, no. 18 (1 June 1994): 579–82. 58. Mary E. Hunt, “Review Article: When Boundaries Betray Us,” Theology and Sexuality 1 (1995), 107–8. 59. K[athleen] Roberts Skerrett, “When No Means Yes: The Passion of Carter Heyward,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 12 (1996): 71, 90. 60. Cristina L. H. Traina, Erotic Attunement: Parenthood and the Ethics of Sensuality Be­ tween Unequals (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 133.

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Woods, Marjorie Curry. “Weeping for Dido: Epilogue on a Premodern Rhetorical Exercise in the Postmodern Classroom.” In Latin Grammar and Rhetoric: From Classical Theory to Medieval Practice, ed. Carol Dana Lanham, 284–94. London: Continuum, 2002. Woolf, Rosemary. “The Theme of Christ the Lover-Knight in Medieval English Literature.” Review of English Studies, n.s., 13 (1962): 1–16. Youngner, Stuart  J. “Some Must Die.” In Organ Transplantation: Meanings and Realities, ed. Stuart J. Youngner, Renée C. Fox, and Laurence J. O’Connell, 32–55. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996. Zaleski, Carol. Otherworld Journeys: Accounts of Near­Death Experience in Medieval and Modern Times. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. Zeitoun, Franck. “The Eagle, the Boar and the Self: Dreams, Daydreams, and Violence in Troilus and Criseyde.” Cercles 6 (2003): 43–53. Ziegler, Joanna E. “On the Artistic Nature of Elisabeth of Spalbeek’s Ecstasy: The Southern Low Countries Do Matter.” In The Texture of Society: Medieval Women in the Southern Low Countries, ed. Ellen Kittell and Mary Suydam, 181–202. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Zizioulas, Jean [John]. Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1985.

Index

Annihilation, mystical, 13, 210–12, 258 Anselm of Canterbury, 31, 57, 203; as archbishop, 293n95; as teacher, 38–44, 293n100, 294n106 Anselm of Laon, 38, 45–46, 294n124 Anthony, St., 13, 236, 248, 252; in art, 214–15; as exemplar for obsessae, 256; impersonated by demon, 330n168; Life of, 214 Aquinas. See Thomas Aquinas Aristotle, Categories, 44–45; on conception, 157–59; De memoria, 292n60 Arnulf of Villers, 65, 67–68, 83, 93, 95; as mind reader, 72, 74–75, 88; Parisian cult of, 90 Asztalos, Monika, 225 Athanasius of Alexandria, 214, 288n14 Athelston, 184 Atwood, Margaret, 208 Augustine of Hippo, 42, 184, 277; Confes­ sions, 44–45, 268; Contra Faustum, 294n121; De catechizandis rudibus, 9, 15, 17–18; De civitate Dei, 97; De doctrina christiana, 17, 19; De libero arbitrio, 19; De magistro, 17; De musica, 19; De ordine, 19; impersonated by demon, 240, 249; on heaven, 11, 61, 97; on imitatio Mariae, 185–87, 203, 206; on memory, 292n60; on original sin, 5, 267; on pedagogy, 1, 15–20, 46, 57, 281; on rape, 229; on the Trinity, 202; on visions, 217, 324n17 Averroes, 158 Avicenna, 158–59 Aymar, Alphonse, 167

Abelard, Peter, 38, 54, 264; ethics of, 27, 292n51; heckled by a student, 46; Historia calamitatum, 45–46; letters ascribed to, 110, 135; as teacher, 24, 42 Abortion, 184, 208 Abramović, Marina, 327n95 Abundus of Huy, 65, 67, 72–73, 95 Accessus ad auctores, 53–54, 297n164 Adam: in Dante, 101; as Platonic form of humanity, 5, 267, 288n14 Adam of Perseigne, 23, 57, 264 Adelmann of Liège, 32–34, 36, 38, 58 Aelfric, 21, 291n31 Aelred of Rievaulx, 265 Alacoque, Marguerite-Marie, 137 Alan of Lille, 3 Alberic of Trois-Fontaines, 68 Albertus Magnus, 5, 203; on conception and pregnancy, 158, 162–63 Albigensian Crusade, 66, 98 Aldobrandino of Siena, 161–62, 170–71, 197 Alexander of Hales, 163 Alice of Schaerbeek, 300n39 Althusser, Louis, 3 Amazon basin, peoples of, 270–71 Ambrose of Milan, 45; De officiis, 22–23, 27, 30; on imitatio Mariae, 185–87, 206; on the Trinity, 202; on the Visitation, 183 Amis and Amiloun, 265, 312n131 Amorth, Gabriele, 216, 274, 325n25 Ancrene Wisse, 75, 77 Anderson, Wendy Love, 240 Androgyny, as erotic ideal, 116–19, 131, 307n41 Angela of Foligno, 143, 198 Angels: at deathbed, 142; demons disguised as, 241; Gabriel, 177; guardian, 210; have no memory, 101; telepathy of, 98 Animals: in hagiography, 269; in romance, 269–70. See also Cats; Toads

Bakhtin, Mikhail, 222 Baldwin, emperor of Constantinople, 68 Bankert, Dabney Anderson, 308n59 Baouardy, Mariam, 253 Baptism, emergency, 168–69, 316n66 Barberino, Francesco da, 170

361

362

I n d ex

Barrett, William, 276 Bartholomaeus Anglicus, 158, 170, 172–73, 197 Basel, Council of, 178, 181 Battle, Michael, 289n22 Baudri of Bourgueil, 49–52 Baxter, Margery, 164 Beatific vision, 97, 169 Beating, in schools, 21, 36, 40, 47 Beatrice, in Dante, 98, 101–2 Beatrice of Nazareth, 65, 69–70, 83, 95; and Ida of Nivelles, 67, 84–86; vernacular text of, 70, 300n34 Beatrice of Savoy, 171 Bec, abbey of, 38–39, 41 Becket, Thomas, 24 Bede, 183 Bedos-Rezak, Brigitte, 56 Benedict, St., 19–20, 23–24, 53 Benedictine Rule, 19–20, 292n57 Benedict XIII, pope, 246 Benjamin, Mara, 206 Benton, John, 295n132 Berengar of Tours, 32–34, 37–38, 45 Bergson, Henri, 276 Bernard de Gordon, 174, 316n67 Bernardino of Siena, 171 Bernard of Chartres, 24 Bernard of Clairvaux, 22, 44, 54, 135, 184; charisma of, 57 Bernard the Penitent, 83 Bernart de Ventadorn, 112–13, 154 Berthold von Regensburg, 232 Binasco, Veronica, 240 Birgitta of Sweden, 64, 194–98, 205; family of, 194, 196; mystical pregnancy of, 195, 197, 201, 321n187 Black Death, 82, 164, 205, 235, 302n92 Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Renate, 236, 238, 245, 247 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 308n71 Boethius, 4, 54, 297n164 Bonaventure, 5, 144, 203, 212 Boniface IX, pope, 178 Bosch, Hieronymus, 214–15, 324n13 Boureau, Alain, 257 Buber, Martin, 280–82, 334n45, 334n47, 334n49 Buddhism, 56, 58, 272 Bugbee, John, 252 Burchard of Worms, 168, 316n63 Bynum, Caroline Walker, 22, 57, 185, 264, 313n155

Cabassut, André, 152 Caciola, Nancy, 217, 301n81 Caesarius of Heisterbach, 70, 83, 106, 223; on demoniacs, 81; on demons, 221–22; on Simon of Aulne, 68, 73, 76; on spiritual pregnancy, 187 Callahan, Anne, 116–18, 307n41, 308n55 Cannibalism, 134–35 Canterbury, 38–39, 41–43; Council of, 165, 168 Carruthers, Mary, 10, 53 Cassaniti, Julia, 272 Cassian, 53 Cassiodorus, 290n27 Castañeda, Carlos, 332n19 Casteen, Elizabeth, 321n178 Caterina de Ricci, 137 Cathedral schools, 20, 32, 36–37, 49, 56–58, 289n6 Catherine of Siena, and exchange of hearts, 11, 107–8, 112, 137, 144–50, 278, 312n132 Catherine of Sweden, 195 Cato, 53 Cats, 241, 242, 274; and demons, 217, 245; in philosophy, 281, 333n47 Cavalcanti, Guido, 114 Cawley, Martinus, 70, 89, 90, 299n19, 304n148 Caxton, William, 184 Certaldo, Paolo da, 174 Cesarean sections, 168–69, 184 Charcot, Jean-Martin, 231 Charismatic pedagogy, 16, 32, 34, 38, 42–43, 54, 56; critiques of, 44–46 Charles II, king of Naples, 100 Charles VI, king of France, 246 Chartres: cathedral, 24, 31, 55; school of, 31–33 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 250, 268; Clerk’s Tale, 252; Troilus and Criseyde, 11, 107–8, 112, 124–29, 143 Chevalier de la Tour Landry, 162 Childbirth, 164–69; amulets and charms for, 166–68; mortality in, 164–65; patron saints of, 315n55. See also Fetus; Pregnancy Chrétien de Troyes, 11, 112, 128, 154; Cligès, 119–23; lost Tristan, 307n47; Yvain, 123–24, 269 Christina Mirabilis, 65–67, 70, 80, 83; and Count Louis of Loon, 79, 82; as demoniac saint, 330n191; as prophet, 72, 79 Christina of Markyate, 240, 264

I n d ex Christine of Stommeln, 13, 211–12, 218–19, 224–34, 274; beatified, 225, 234; contrasted with Ermine of Reims, 265; death of, 233; delivered from her demons, 219, 233, 275; as demonic martyr, 225, 236, 252, 326n62; as exhibitionist, 231, 234, 259, 275, 327n95; friendship with Peter of Dacia, 227, 232, 251, 283; mental illness of, 233, 275; pelted with excrement by demons, 231–32; possessed, 230; as problem for discernment, 330n191; sexual fantasies of, 228; spiritual plagiarism of, 232; suicidal, 212, 228; vexed by toads, 226, 243 Chronopoulos, Tina, 52 Cicero: on deportment, 22, 30; on friendship, 265, 305n8; on memory, 292n60 Clare of Montefalco, 150, 278 Clement of Alexandria, 203 Clement VI, pope, 302n92 Clement VII, pope, 246 Coakley, John, 232 Cohen, Jeremy, 172 Coinherence, 4–9; asymmetry and reciprocity in, 265, 284; between humans and animals, 269–70; between individual and universal, 267–68; between living and dead, 265–66; and codependence, 14; in Dante, 11, 99–102; defined, 4–6; with demons, 221, 262; distinct from identity, 118, 131; and exchange of hearts, 108, 110–12, 132; in friendship, 86; and heart transplants, 277–79; limits of, 212; and mind reading, 71; mystical, 136, 139, 153; and personal boundaries, 279–84; and pregnancy, 156, 163, 203, 206; and psi phenomena, 277; in theology, 4–6, 12, 264; and theories of mind, 270–74; as ubuntu, 7 Colette of Corbie, 253 Conception, theories of, 157–59. See also Fetus; Pregnancy Confession: before childbirth, 165; charismatic vs. routinized, 76; emergency, 302n92; and miraculous mind reading, 71–81; as political critique, 78; in sacramental theology, 76, 82 Confucius, 55–56 Conon de Béthune, 113 Constance, Council of, 195 Cosmas and Damian, saints, 152; in art, 312n142 Cozzarelli, Guidoccio, 147–48

363

cummings, e. e., 154–55 Curé d’Ars. See Vianney, Jean-Marie Curie, Marie, 276 Cuthbert, St., 269 d’Ailly, Pierre, 217 Damian, Peter, 29, 280; Liber Gomorrhianus, 48–49, 295n144 Dante Alighieri, 9, 11, 268, 277; De vulgari eloquentia, 98, 173; Inferno, 13, 209–11, 323n1; Paradiso, 59, 61, 72, 97–102; Vita Nuova, 122 d’Assignies, Jean, 68 de Certeau, Michel, 259 Delaurenti, Béatrice, 266 de Mondeville, Henri, 158 Demoniacs, 81–82, 255; legal impunity for, 212; as preachers, 257; types of, 254. See also Christine of Stommeln; Ermine of Reims Demonic syndrome, 254–57, 274–75 Demonology: Franciscan vs. Dominican, 257; principles of, 222, 253–54 Demon porn, 229, 259 Demons, 209–62 passim; and Catherine of Siena, 149–50; as cause of all sounds, 219, 222; charms against, 167; corporeal vs. spiritual, 222, 324n18; dancing, 244; exorcised, 92–93; in hagiography, 214; have knowledge of sins, 81–82; have sex, 243; hierarchy of, 219, 325n25; hurl excrement, 227, 231; Latinity of, 260, 331n203; in necromancy, 47; offer money, 244; as tempters, 49 Deploige, Jeroen, 299n22 de Rougemont, Denis, 116, 307n42 Derrida, Jacques, 333n47 Descartes, René, 289n22 De secretis mulierum, 158, 162–63 De similitudinibus, 42 Devotio Moderna, 26 Diabolophanies, 211, 218–20, 231, 234 Dialogue de Placides et Timéo, 158, 162 Dilley, Paul, 97 Dinzelbacher, Peter, 324n6 Discernment of spirits, 214, 240; by Ermine of Reims, 238–39; in Gerson, 217–18, 239, 248, 254; in hagiography, 78; and mental health, 256; purposes of, 210–11; treatises on, 217–18 Disciplina, 34, 38, 40, 57; defined, 26–27; and Victorines, 26–29

364

I n d ex

Distaff Gospels, 159–60, 184 Domestic violence, 162, 184–85 Donatus, 35 Doniger, Wendy, 333n42 Donne, John, 109, 111 Dorothea of Montau: and exchange of hearts, 112, 137–38, 144–45, 150–53; life of, 194–95, 197, 205, 238; mystical pregnancy of, 156, 198–99, 201, 321n187 Durandus, William, 174 Eadmer of Canterbury, 40, 42–44, 57 Easton, Adam, 178 Eaten-heart tales, 112, 134–35, 152, 277–78, 308n71 Ebner, Christina, 193 Ebner, Margaret, 194, 320n165 Eckhart, Meister, 185, 201, 203; on birth of Christ in the soul, 188–91, 194, 200; condemned teachings of, 13, 212–13, 324n8; and Martin Buber, 281, 334n49 Edward IV, king of England, 178 Egbert of Liège, 21 Einstein, Albert, 276 Elisabeth of Spalbeek, 64–65, 68–70; and Marie of Lille, 91–92; as Passion performer, 69, 79, 327n95; as prophet, 69, 79–80, 301n81 Elizabeth, mother of John the Baptist, 177–84 Elliott, Dyan, 48 Epistolae duorum amantium, 109–12, 333n43 Ermine of Reims, 13, 211–12, 218–19, 229, 234–52, 265, 273; asceticism of, 236, 244–45, 251; death of, 248, 250; devotions of, 237; diabolophanies of, 238, 243; and discernment of spirits, 238–39; eucharistic visions of, 248; and Jean de Varennes, 246–50; and Jean Gerson, 234–35, 242–43, 275; marriage and family of, 235, 328n100; obedience to confessor, 235, 237–38, 250; psychotic episode of, 241; self-loathing of, 236, 239; sexual temptations of, 243; suicidal, 240–41, 247, 252; and witchcraft, 245–47 Erotics of instruction, 18, 41, 71. See also Charismatic pedagogy Etsi Judeos, 171 Eucharist, 64, 136; devotion to, 66, 79, 151; and Jews, 171–72; and mother mysticism, 191–92, 200; and Padre Pio, 104; and Sacred Heart, 144; visions during, 248

Eustochio of Padua, 253 Eve of Saint-Martin, 65, 69, 86 Everyman, 267–68 Exchange of hearts, 11; and blood brotherhood, 115; and Catherine of Siena, 144–50; in Chrétien de Troyes, 119–24; and Dorothea of Montau, 150–53; in Flamenca, 128–32; as hagiographic motif, 135–38, 144; at Helfta, 138–44; with Jesus, 135–53; in love lyrics, 111–15, 306n32; in Roman du Castelain de Couci, 132–35; in Tristan, 116–19; in Troilus and Criseyde, 124–28 Exorcism, 212, 272–74, 303n139; by Lutgard of Aywières, 92; of Christine of Stommeln, 232; contemporary, 274; early modern, 254, 273 Eze, Michael Onyebuchi, 7 Falconieri, Juliana, 144 Faustus, Manichaean bishop, 45, 294n121 Fénelon, François de, 258 Fetus: determining sex of, 158–60; development of, 158; personhood of, 182–83; stillborn, 168–69 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 5 Field, Sean, 301n81 Fin’amor, 112, 119, 124, 128 Flamenca, 112, 126, 128–32; date of, 308n64 Folco of Marseille (Fulk of Toulouse), 66, 98; in Dante, 98–100 Forsyth, Ilene, 49 Fortune, Marie, 283 Fourth Lateran Council, 64, 98, 102, 106, 169, 172, 302n94; “Omnis utriusque sexus,” 76, 82–83, 301n61, 301n64 Foxe, John, 176 Francesca Romana, 253 Francis of Assisi, 264, 269 Franco of Archennes, 83 Freud, Sigmund, 273, 276, 281; Das Ich und das Es, 280, 334n45 Friendship: between teacher and student, 40–41; Ciceronian, 265, 305n8; crossgender, 84, 87, 93–95, 257; “particu lar,” 141, 310n101; rhetoric of, 32; spiritual, 83–95, 257; women’s, 84–87, 141–44, 310n102 Fulbert of Chartres, 15, 31–36, 57, 283 Fulgentius, 54 Fulk of Toulouse. See Folco of Marseille Furber, Donald, 117–18

I n d ex Gace Brulé, 113 Galati, Frank, 267 Galen, 157–58, 313n2 Galgani, Gemma, 253 Gallagher, Joseph, 126 Galloway, Andrew, 191 Ganymede, 49–50 Gélis, Jacques, 316n62 Geoffrey Plantagenet, 24 Gerbert of Reims, 31 Gerlach of Houthem, 83 Gerson, Jean: and Birgitta of Sweden, 195; on discernment of spirits, 217–18, 239, 248, 254; and Ermine of Reims, 234–35, 242–43, 275 Gertrude of Hackeborn, 138 Gertrude the Great, 112, 137–44, 150 Ghinassi, Ghino, 102 Giles of Rome, 26 Girls, education of, 50–51, 296nn150–51, 323n211 Giuliani, Veronica, 253 Gladstone, William, 276 Glossa ordinaria, 38 Gobert of Aspremont, 83, 300n39 Godfrey of Saint-Victor, 28–29, 57 Godric of Finchale, 64, 269 Golden Legend, 137, 144, 152, 214, 330n168 Goswin of Anchin, 46 Goswin of Liège and Mainz, 31, 36–38, 54, 57 Goswin of Villers, 10, 65, 83, 92, 97, 100, 258, 277; born in Bossut, 298n17; Life of Arnulf, 75, 90; Life of Ida of Nivelles, 86, 95–96, 102; style of, 89 Gottfried von Strassburg, 112, 116–19, 132 Graham, Hilary, 12 Grandier, Urbain, 261 Grass, Günter, 195 Great Schism, 144, 149, 178, 246 Green, Monica, 314n30 Gregory the Great, 254, 277; on demonic speech, 223; Regula pastoralis, 19–20, 24; on telepathy in heaven, 11, 61, 98 Griselda, 197, 251–52, 256 Grünewald, Matthias, 214 Guerric of Igny, 187 Guibert of Nogent, 41–42, 47, 57, 295n132 Guilhem de Cabestaing, 308n71 Guillemeau, Jacques, 320n157 Guitmund of Aversa, 34, 39, 54 Guy de Couci, 132 Guyon, Madame, 258

365

Hadewijch of Brabant, 143, 188–89, 200–201 Hale, Rosemary Drage, 191 Haly Abbas, 158 Harrison, Anna, 140 Harry Potter, 15–16, 289n5 Hartmann von Aue, 312n131 Hastings, Michael, 327n93 Heart transplants, 108, 153–54, 278–79 Helfta, 112, 137–44, 152 Heloise, 27, 110, 135, 292n51 Henry II, king of England, 24 Henry of Langenstein, 217, 239 Hereford Cathedral, 316n72 Heresy: Donatist, 76, 246, 249; eucharistic, 32, 37–38, 255; of Jean de Varennes, 246–47, 249; mystical, 213; universalist, 242 Herluin of Bec, 39 Hermits, 83 Heyward, Carter, 282–84 Hilary of Poitiers, 202 Hildegard of Bingen, 159, 165 Hildegar of Poitiers, 15, 34–36, 57, 283 Hippocrates, 157 Histoire de Marie et de Jésus, 182 History of emotions, 266–67 Hollander, Jean, 98 Hollander, Robert, 98 Holy Maidenhood, 164 Holy Name, 136 Homoerotic poetry, 51–52 Homosexuality, 82, 302n94; punishment of, 295n144 Honorius Augustodunensis, 42 Horace, 34, 37, 46 Horace Mann School, 48 Howie, George, 18 Hugh of Floreffe, 65, 68, 78 Hugh of Fouilloy, 31 Hugh of Pierrepont, 68 Hugh of Saint-Cher, 69 Hugh of Saint-Victor, 22, 34, 43; De institutione nouitiorum, 26–30; Didascali­ con, 26, 291n47; miracle of, 144 Humbert of Romans, 26 Hunt, Bonnie, 154 Hunt, Mary, 283 Ibn Hazm of Cordoba, 111, 306n20 Ida of Gorsleeuw (“the Gentle”), 65, 70, 74, 86–88

366

I n d ex

Ida of Leuven (“the Eager”), 65; as critic of clergy, 78–79; friendships of, 87, 93–94; Life of, 70; mystical pregnancy of, 191–92 Ida of Nivelles (“the Compassionate”), 65, 70, 83, 102; and Beatrice of Nazareth, 84–86; in ecstatic prayer, 95–96; Life of, 67; as mind reader, 72, 74, 88, 95–96, 243; and priests, 90–94 Ignatius of Antioch, 136–37 Imagination: maternal, 160; in theories of mind, 271 Imago Dei, 4, 56 Imitatio Mariae, 185–201, 206 Imitation, in pedagogy, 19, 34–38, 46, 56–57 Indwelling. See Coinherence Infant mortality, 165, 174 Innocent III, pope, 68, 73, 75, 171, 289n6 Irreducible Mind, 276–77; sequels to, 333n35 Isaac ben Moses, rabbi, 172 Isidore of Seville, 158, 290n27 Jacobus de Voragine, 137. See also Golden Legend Jacques de Vitry, 68, 72, 93; career of, 66; exempla of, 184; friendship with Marie d’Oignies, 73–74, 94; Life of Marie, 65, 87–88, 98; and Thomas of Cantimpré, 66, 74, 78 Jaeger, C. Stephen, 31; on cathedral schools, 20, 22; on charisma, 16, 54–55; on ennobling love, 116, 307n40; on sex abuse, 48 Jakemes, 132, 135, 277–78 James, William, 276–77 Janet, Pierre, 276 Jean, duke of Berry, 52 Jean d’Arras, 269 Jean de Bar, 245 Jean de Meun, 250 Jean de Varennes, 246–51 Jean Le Graveur, 218, 234–52, 275; ambitions of, 236; audience of, 327n98; authorship of, 234–35; critiqued by Ermine’s false saints, 249–50; and Jean de Varennes, 246–47; as spiritual director, 238, 248–49, 252, 265 Jeanne, countess of Flanders, 83 Jeanne des Anges, 259–62, 331n203 Jerome, St., 202, 257 Jesus: as bridegroom, 137, 146; charisma of, 55; as fetus, 177–83; as infant, 193–94, 200; as mind reader, 61–63, 71, 83, 272; as mother,

185, 204–5, 322n204; name of, 136–37; on prayer, 95. See also Sacred Heart Jewish-Christian relations, 171–72 Johanna, queen of Naples, 321n178 Johannes de Serravalle, 59, 99–100, 304n162 John of Damascus, 5 John of Floreffe, 69 John of Fruttuaria, 22–23, 27 John of Jenstein, 177–78, 182 John of Nivelle, 75 John of Salisbury, 24–26, 47–48, 57 John of the Cross, 258 John the Baptist, 77; as fetus, 177–83; impersonated by demon, 239–40, 242 John the Evangelist, 23, 136; appears in vision, 78; Christology of, 5, 62–63, 201; and Dante, 99–102 Joseph, Hermann, 135–36 Jouet, Pierre, 68 Juana de la Cruz, 203–4, 322n201 Juan del Castillo, 253 Juliana of Cornillon, 65, 69–70, 86 Julian of Norwich, 204–6, 242, 288n14; education of, 323n211 Jung, C. G., 276 Jutta of Borgloon, 66–67 Karnes, Michelle, 271 Kay, Sarah, 114 Kelly, Edward, 277, 333n33 Kempe, Margery, 197–98, 237, 328n111 Kieckhefer, Richard, 48, 197, 256, 324n6 Kleinberg, Aviad, 232, 326n62 Konrad of Megenberg, 174 Lanfranc of Pavia, 38–39, 41, 43, 58 Lang, Andrew, 276 Langmann, Adelheid, 137, 193–94 La Ramée, 67, 88, 91 Laurent, Sylvie, 160 Legenda major, illuminated, 145–47 Leo IX, pope, 49, 160, 295n144 Leprosaria, 65, 68–70, 77 Leprosy: afflicts Alice of Schaerbeek, 300n39; curable by pure blood, 149, 312n131; in Gospel, 62; and Yvette of Huy, 68–69, 77, 96 Levertov, Denise, 334n47 Leyerle, John, 124 Liber ordinis S. Victoris, 29 Liège (city): cathedral school, 36–37; leper hospital, 69

I n d ex Liège (diocese), 75; as center for hagiography, 68–70; language boundary in, 89 Limbo of children, 169 Litterae et mores, 16, 40, 53; as curriculum, 20–21; replaced by scholasticism, 37–38 Liutpold of Mainz, 36 Lochrie, Karma, 143 Lodge, Oliver, 276 Loudun, possession at, 259–62 Louis, count of Loon, 79, 82 Louis IX, king of France, 92, 133 Louviers, possession at, 331n201 Love, psychologies of, 109–12, 114. See also Fin’amor Ludus regularis, 21 Luhrmann, Tanya, 59–60, 89, 97; forum on theories of mind, 270–74 Lukardis of Oberweimar, 192–93 Lutgard of Aywières, 65, 112; exchange of hearts, 137; as exorcist, 92–93, 257; and Jacques de Vitry, 73–74, 78; and languages, 67, 89–90, 105; Life of, 67; as mind reader, 67, 78, 89–90; and Simon of Aulne, 92–94, 257, 303n138 Luther, Martin, 42 Maagdendaal, 69, 85, 88, 91 Magic: for childbirth, 166–68, 316n62; as entertainment, 275, 333n30; sator arepo charm, 167, 316n61. See also Necromancy; Witchcraft Malleus maleficarum, 224 Mandela, Nelson, 7, 254 Manichaeans, 45 Marbod of Rennes, 49–52 Margaret of Antioch, St., 166–68, 176, 315n55, 315n57 Margaret of Ypres, 65, 70, 93; and Friar Zeger, 67, 88, 94; Life of, 67; as prophet, 80 Marguerite, countess of Flanders, 80, 83 Marguerite d’Oingt, 322n204 Maria Maddalena de’ Pazzi, 253 Maria Medingen (nunnery), 194, 320n165 Marie de France, 122, 173; Bisclavret, 269; Guigemar, 307n34 Marie d’Oignies, 64–65, 70, 83, 93, 96; and gift of tears, 87–88; and Jacques de Vitry, 73–74, 78, 94; Life of, 65–66, 98, 106; as nurse, 68, 70 Marienwerder, Johannes, 138, 151–52, 156, 195, 198–99

367

Marie of Brabant, queen of France, 80 Marie of Lille, 92 Martianus Capella, 292n60 Mary Magdalene, 62, 240 Mary Tudor, queen of England, 176, 192 Matthias of Linköping, 195 Maximus the Confessor, 5 Mayan culture, 273 Mazza, Giulia, 272 Mbiti, John, 7 McAlister, Shannon, 202, 322n199 McCaffery, John, 105 McGuire, Brian Patrick, 294n106 Mechthild of Hackeborn, 112, 138–44, 150; death of, 142–43; friendship with Gertrude, 141–43; on Sacred Heart, 139, 141; vision of Christ Child, 193 Mechthild of Magdeburg, 138 Meinhard of Bamberg, 38 Mélusine, 269–70 Memory: cellular, 154; imaged by wax, 10, 40, 292n60; imaged by womb, 319n142; lacking in angels, 101; and learning by heart, 53 Ménagier de Paris, 328n100 Menstrual taboos, 158, 313n8 Mental illness, 14; caused by penitential asceticism, 217, 243; of Christine of Stommeln, 229, 233, 275; cross-cultural views of, 272–73; and demonic syndrome, 254–56, 274–75; of Ermine of Reims, 238–41; and hormones, 233, 327n93; obsessivecompulsive, 216–17, 234, 274; of Richalm of Schöntal, 220 Mews, Constant, 110 Midwives, 12, 163, 168–69, 316n66; decline and revival of, 315n42 Mind reading, miraculous, 10–11, 59–106 passim; and confession, 71–83; in Dante, 97–102; by demoniacs, 60, 71, 81–82; by Jesus, 61–64; at Mass, 87–88; by modern saints, 102–6; and spiritual friendship, 83–97 Minnesingers, 114–15 Mirk, John, 168; Festial, 184 Molinos, Miguel de, 258 Morel, Jean, 234, 242–43, 328n114 Morris, Colin, 57 Morrison, Karl, 279 Moschus, François, 68 Mulder-Bakker, Anneke, 77 Münster-Swendsen, Mia, 26, 37, 48

368

I n d ex

Murray, Alexander, 76, 222 Muscio, 161 Myers, F. W. H., 276–77 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 313n155 Necromancy, 47–48 Nelli, René, 111, 115–16, 129, 132 Neoplatonism, 186–87 New Age religion, 273–74 “O admirabile Veneris idolum,” 51, 296n155 Obsession, demonic: and ocd, 216; distinguished from possession, 213–14 Obsessive-compulsive disorder (ocd), 216–17, 234, 274 Oculus sacerdotis, 162 Odilia of Liège, 68 Odilo of Cluny, 35 Odo of Sully, 168 Okot p’Bitek, 266 Olavsson, Petrus, 195 Old Boy networks, 9, 31, 33–34, 58 Olivi, Peter of John, 257 Origen, 183, 185 Or Zarua, 172 Osanna of Mantua, 137 Otloh of St. Emmeram, 21–22 Ovid, 49–50; Heroïdes, 54; Metamorphoses, 222 Ovide moralisé, 54 Pachomius, St., 64 Paden, Frances, 166 Paden, William, 166, 308n69 Padre Pio, 60, 73, 103–6, 253 Papua New Guinea, 271–72 Pardons (religious festivals), 237, 328n113 Paris, University of, 234, 245, 289n6 Park, Katharine, 166, 315n42 Paul, apostle, 20, 64, 201; imitation of, 57; as mother, 185; theology of, 5, 267 Paul the Deacon, 21 Paul the Simple, 245, 247–48, 250, 256, 330n168 Pederasty. See Sex abuse: clerical Performance art, 234, 327n95 Perichoresis, 4–6 Persona, 3–4, 38, 263 Personal boundaries, 2, 6, 13; and ethics, 279–84; and psychology of love, 109 Personalism, 280

Personhood: in African thought, 7, 266; changing concepts of, 3–6, 56, 263–64; of fetus, 182–83; and hybridity, 269–70; irreducible, 210–14, 258; threatened by demons, 220 Peter, apostle, 23, 62–63; impersonated by demon, 240 Peter of Candia, 181 Peter of Dacia, 218–19, 224–34, 239, 251, 265, 283; career of, 224; as Christine of Stommeln’s patron, 232; De naturam gratia ditante, 326n68; death of, 218–19, 234, 275; editions of, 326n59; ideal of sainthood, 226–27; as impresario, 231; as inventor of demon porn, 229; lies of, 232; Life of Christine, 224–25 Peter the Venerable, 49 Petrarch, Francesco, 252, 256 Philip II, king of France, 289n6 Philip II, king of Spain, 176 Philip of Clairvaux, 65, 69, 91–92, 97 Philippa of Chantemilan, 169 Philo of Alexandria, 201 Pius XI, pope, 104 Plato, 295n129; Theaetetus, 186, 292n60 Pliny the Elder, 158 Porete, Marguerite, 13, 210–13, 258, 323n2; influence on Quietism, 330n192 Possidius of Calama, 17 Prayer, theory of, 88–89, 95–96, 102 Pregnancy: allegory of, 188–89; eye exam for, 192, 320n157; false, 176, 192; folklore about, 160; of God, 201–6; legal protections for, 164; as metaphor, 156–57, 185–87, 199–200, 203; and misogyny, 163; mystical, 191–201; of prostitutes, 163; sex during, 162–63; and social class, 162; spiritual, 185–91. See also Childbirth; Fetus; Pregnant women Pregnant women: prayers and blessings for, 174–77, 317n98; regimen for, 160–64 Problemata physica, 266 Prophecy, 60; of Christina Mirabilis, 72, 79; defined by Gregory the Great, 71; of Elisabeth of Spalbeek, 69, 79–80; of John the Baptist, 77; of Juliana of Cornillon, 86; of Margaret of Ypres, 80; in romance, 83; of Simon of Aulne, 79; of Yvette of Huy, 77–78 Pseudo-Albertus Magnus, 158, 162–63 Pseudo-Arnold of Villanova, 174 Psi phenomena, 276–77 Psychoanalysis, 109, 274, 282, 295n132

I n d ex Quest of the Holy Grail, 83, 312n131 Quietism, 258, 330n192 Quintilian, 26, 53, 292n60 Rachman, Stanley, 234 Rahner, Hugo, 185 Rape, 228–29, 327n80 Rayleigh, Lord, 276 Raymond of Capua: as hagiographer, 107–8, 144–50, 278, 312n132; as liturgist, 178–81 Raymond of Penyafort, 163 Reiss, Timothy, 3, 263 Respite miracles, 169 Reyman, Johannes, 152 Ribet, Jérôme, 152 Richalm of Schöntal, 209, 211, 218–24, 231, 241; and Brother N., 223; on coinherence with demons, 221; empathy of, 220, 266; loss of personhood by, 220–21, 255; mental illness of, 220 Richard de Bury, 52–53 Richard of Saint-Victor, 43, 57, 135; Four Degrees of Violent Charity, 199; poem in honor of, 28–29 Richelieu, Cardinal, 261 Robert, king of France, 31 Robert of Courçon, 76 Rodriguez, Alfonso, 253 Rogier, Peire, 128, 132 Roisin, Simone, 82 Roman du Castelain de Couci et de la Dame de Fayel, 112, 132–35, 152, 277–78 Rudel, Jaufre, 132 Ruskin, John, 276 Rutler, George, 103 Sacred Heart, 139–42; and Eucharist, 144 Sahlin, Claire, 196 Saint-Victor, abbey of, 20, 28–31, 56 Salimbene di Adam, 232 Sarum Missal, 175, 302n85, 317n100 Sayce, Olive, 306n32 Schmidt, Paul Gerhard, 220, 223 Schmitt, Jean-Claude, 221 Schongauer, Martin, 214 Scott, Karen, 145 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 311n115 “Sending God,” as prayer practice, 84–85, 89–91, 102 Setiloane, Gabriel, 7

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Sex abuse: clerical, 48–52, 76, 93, 279–80; in therapy, 285 Shahar, Shulamith, 170, 174 Shakespeare, William, 3; “Phoenix and the Turtle,” 111, 306n18; Romeo and Juliet, 173; Troilus and Cressida, 308n63 Sigal, Pierre André, 169 Simon of Aulne, 65, 79, 83, 89, 94–95, 275, 302n94; career of, 68; and confession, 75–77, 82; and Innocent III, 73, 75, 96; and Lutgard of Aywières, 92–93, 105, 257, 303n138; refuses ordination, 73, 75; sources on, 68, 303n138 Sinclair, John, 99 Sisterbooks, 193, 310n101 Sixtus IV, pope, 178, 181 Skepticism: early modern, 260; medieval, 89, 216–17, 221, 241, 256; modern, 275, 278–79 Skerrett, K. Roberts, 284 Slattery, Dennis, 279 Sluhovsky, Moshe, 259, 273 Society for Psychical Research, 276–77 Socrates, 12, 32, 55, 186, 295n129 Solterer, Helen, 135 Soranus, 161 Southern, R. W., 38–39, 43 Spark, Muriel, 15 Spearing, A. C., 268 Speculum virginum, 186–87, 197 Spielberg, Steven, 1 Stehling, Thomas, 51 Stillbirth, 168–69, 316n63 Suicide, as demonic temptation, 212, 228, 240–41, 247, 252–53 Sunder, Friedrich, 187 Surin, Jean-Joseph, 209, 261–62, 331n203 Surrogacy, 207–8 Surtz, Ronald, 322n201 Suso, Henry, 254 Sylvia, Claire, 154 Tageliet, 114–15, 306n32 Taylor, Charles, 2, 8, 12, 109, 263, 270–71 Tears, gift of, 87–88 Tegernsee, 54, 111–12 Telepathy, 10, 71, 80, 88, 94; in heaven, 97–102; in psychic research, 275–77. See also Mind reading, miraculous Tennyson, Alfred Lord, 276 Teresa of Avila, 137

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Theories of mind: Christian, 59–60, 89; cross-cultural, 270–74; of William James, 276 Thibaut de Champagne, 113 Thomas Aquinas, 58; on conception, 158–59; in Dante, 101; death of, 311n129; on demons, 212, 257; on heaven, 11, 98; teacher of Peter of Dacia, 326n68; on the Trinity, 4, 203 Thomas of Britain, 116, 118 Thomas of Cantimpré, 64–65, 89, 97, 106, 258; career of, 66; exempla of, 221–22; and Jacques de Vitry, 74, 78; Life of Christina Mirabilis, 66, 79, 330n191; Life of Lutgard, 67, 92–94, 112, 137–38; Life of Margaret of Ypres, 67; on Marie d’Oignies, 66 Thomas of Courcelles, 181 Thomson, J. J., 276 Toads: demonic, 226, 228, 243; as ex-votos, 329n147; as symbols of female sexuality, 74, 96, 226, 243 Tommaso della Fonte, 145 Traina, Cristina, 284 Transubstantiation, 172; of Dorothea’s heart, 151; of Eckhart’s soul, 212 Trinity, theology of, 3–5, 12, 201–5 Tristan, 112, 116–19, 121, 128, 307n42 Trota of Salerno, 314n30 Trotula, 158, 162, 314n16, 314n30 Troubadours and trouvères, 116, 296n153; and eaten-heart tales, 308n71; first-person voice of, 268; and Flamenca, 128–29, 132; and the separable heart, 11, 112–15; vidas of, 268 Tutu, Desmond, 7 Ubuntu, 7 Ulrich von Lichtenstein, 115 Ulrich von Winterstetten, 114 Urban II, pope, 43 Urban VI, pope, 150, 178 Vaughn, Sally, 39 Vianney, Jean-Marie (Curé d’Ars), 60, 103–6, 253 Villers, 67, 74, 90 Vincent of Beauvais, 16, 26, 112, 136, 162 Virgil, 39, 53; Aeneid, 54; in Dante, 97

Virgin Mary: compared to priests, 187; feasts of, 177; gave birth without pain, 193; gives Christ Child to devotees, 151, 193–94; imitation of, 183, 185–201, 206; letter to, 136; letters from, 167; as Maria Joachimsdotter, 196; as midwife, 196; sanctified in the womb, 175; visions of, 85, 240; Visitation of, 177–85, 206 Visitation, feast of, 177–85, 206; in art, 178–80, 191; dates for, 318n104 Volfing, Annette, 189 Walcher of Liège, 36–37, 57 Walther von der Vogelweide, 306n32 Ward, Benedicta, 205 Warnick, Bryan, 295n129 Watkins, Dennis, 333n30 Webb, Heather, 109, 312n132 Weston, Hugh, 176 Wet nurses, 12, 169–74; employed by Jewish families, 171–72; how to choose, 171; and infant mortality, 174 Wibald of Noyon, 21 Wibald of Stavelot, 24 William of Champeaux, 38, 292n51 William of Conches, 15, 24–26, 57, 313n8 William of Savoy, 136 Williams, Charles, 6, 102, 282, 284 Williams, Rowan, 293n95 Wisdom traditions, 55–57 Witchcraft, 245–47, 254, 260–61 Wolfram von Eschenbach, 306n32 Woodville, Elizabeth, 178 Worringen, battle of, 233 Wu­wei, 55–56, 297n171 Yoga, 56, 58 Youngner, Stuart, 279 Yvette of Huy, 65, 83, 93, 275; career of, 68–70; community of, 77; as critic of clergy, 77–78, 82; as prophet, 72, 77–78, 96 Zeger, friar, 67, 80, 93–94 Zeitoun, Franck, 126 Zerboldt, Gerard, 26 Zombies, 210, 222

Acknowledgments

Long in the making, this book was completed in the summer of 2020, the plague year. As I write these words, an ongoing apocalypse compels us to reconsider our interconnectedness from a painful new perspective. The threat of contagion makes my friend my enemy; avoidance becomes an act of love, distance a sign of community. I am allowed to touch a single person, my husband, while all others are faces on a screen or masked strangers who flee from me, and from whom I must flee. The dance of social distancing marks the loss of all that seemed human. As the ubiquitous Zoom replaces real presence, sacraments are in abeyance, hugs forbidden. In these times it feels more urgent than ever to express gratitude for all the connections—real and virtual, from rushed emails to leisurely conference dinners—that go into the making of scholarship. So I would like to thank the many friends and colleagues who have answered my questions, suggested helpful avenues of research, saved me from errors, shared their unpublished work, and inspired me with their brilliance. C. Stephen Jaeger and Dyan Elliott have prompted both admiring and skeptical thoughts with their “glass half full” and “glass half empty” approaches to the erotics of pedagogy. Katharine Park graciously reviewed Chapter 4 and gave me the benefit of her expertise in the history of medicine. Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski read an earlier draft of Chapter 5, after bringing the tribulations of Ermine of Reims to the world’s attention. Jeroen Deploige of the University of Gent kindly allowed me to consult his transcript of the Life of Simon of Aulne, the beginning of a fruitful collaboration to edit and translate that text. I also think Dyan Elliott, Shannon McAlister, and Ronald Surtz for letting me cite unpublished versions of their work. Anselm Min first challenged me to think about what medieval notions like the exchange of hearts might have to say about contemporary problems. John Coakley’s work on medieval holy women and their male collaborators underlies much of this project, while Karl Morrison inspired me to share his fascination with the formula “I am you.” Anneke Mulder-Bakker, along with the late Margot

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King and Fr. Martinus Cawley, did much to set the mulieres sanctae of Liège before the eyes of medievalists. Tanya Luhrmann and Troy Tice have long been stimulating interlocutors, and Diane Baia Hale made a wonderful suggestion at just the right time. I am grateful beyond words to Richard Kieckhefer, as always, for everything from tech support to patient listening and trenchant commentary. I would also like to thank the institutions that invited me to present material from this book and offered valuable feedback: the Chicago Seminar on Medieval Culture and Intellect, Disciples Divinity House, the National University of Ireland in Galway, Simpson College in Iowa, Lake Forest College, Harvard, Stanford, the University of Arkansas, and Claremont Graduate University. Other planned talks fell as casualties to the pandemic, but the invitations are no less appreciated. The Northwestern Dante Reading Group has been a source of joy and inspiration for the past three years. I am grateful to my colleagues and students in the Medieval Studies Cluster for many a convivial, stimulating chat: may our serendipitous meetings in the coffeehouse and the copy room soon return! The appalling closure of libraries reminds me to thank our unflagging Interlibrary Loan staff, who are as eager to resume their jobs as researchers are to have them back again. Finally, I thank Jerry Singerman, my friend and longtime editor at the University of Pennsylvania Press, and the two anonymous press readers. As the slow, arduous process of writing a book approaches the finish line, it is comforting to know it is in good hands.