Anne E. Bailey
A blind woman at Becket's shrine felt a great disturbance in her head, as if she were engulfed in a raging furnace. Ripping away her veil and clawing at the garments at her breast she fell to the floor and lay there for the space of an hour, after which, opening her eyes and picking herself up she burst out, ‘I can see’.1
Miraculous cures are occasions of high drama in medieval miracle accounts, often characterised by tears, screams, writhing and collapses into unconsciousness. The above example, taken from Benedict of Peterborough's twelfth-century miracula of Thomas Becket, was singled out for comment by the social historian Ronald Finucane in the late 1970s. Reacting to the blind woman's conduct with incomprehension bordering on distaste, Finucane concluded that medieval women were psychologically susceptible to the emotionally charged atmosphere at a saint's shrine.2 Although a longer deliberation on the topic in 2006 by Sarah Hopper was more sympathetic, it still failed to find a plausible explanation as to why ‘hysteria and even hysterics’ were ‘a significant component of the medieval woman's pilgrim experience’, and little attention has been given to the subject since.3
Had Finucane and Hopper taken a wider socio-religious approach, they may have recognised that this pattern of female behaviour was not especially specific to the cult of saints, nor to the Middle Ages. It appears, for example, in a slightly different guise in a vernacular romance written by one of Benedict of Peterborough's twelfth-century contemporaries, Chrétien de Troyes. In Yvain: The Knight of the Lion, Chrétien includes an episode describing the widow, Laudine, grieving at her husband's bier. This scene is particularly striking in respect of Laudine's behaviour, because the widow conducts herself very much like the blind girl at Becket's tomb: she rips at her clothes, tears her hair and falls to the ground in a faint.4
The tearing of the hair, the laceration of the body and the rending of clothes are standard, formulaic gestures associated with what is often conceived as a peculiarly ‘feminine’ ritual: lamentation. The ritual lament is not a spontaneous outpouring of raw emotion, but an orchestrated display of grief found in many different times and cultures.5 Although revisionist scholars remind us that lamentation was also practised by men, it is generally agreed that, in most societies, women played a ‘prominent role’ in ritual mourning, and that representations of grief are ‘profoundly shaped to gender’.6
The practice of lamenting the dead seems to have its origins in the ancient east, and is first attested in Europe in the time of Homer.7 In the Greek tradition, lamentation was articulated through body language remarkably similar to that attributed to female pilgrims in medieval miracle accounts: that is, through tears, wailing, erratic gestures and – in one of its more extreme forms – through fainting and madness.8 As a social practice, lamentation survived into the Middle Ages, although the Christian authorities in the west regarded it with a certain amount of ambivalence. Theologians may have been happy to pen elegiac laments about their Christian heroes in the Old Testament tradition, but – as will be shown – lamentation as an unregulated, popular custom was repeatedly denounced as pagan, irrational and anti-Christian.
Although the cult of saints initially appears to have little to do with rituals of mourning, there are some significant connections. Pre-eminent among these is the fact that medieval saint devotion owed much to older pre-Christian practices mourning dead ancestors and heroes: a development readily acknowledged by Augustine in the fourth century.9 To all intents and purposes, the Christian patron saint – the community's spiritual paterfamilias – took the place of the deceased pagan hero in the hearts and minds of early Christians.10 It is well known that many elements of pagan ritual were assimilated into local saint veneration in the medieval west, and Christian cult devotees certainly shared at least one aspiration with traditional lamenters: by way of their ‘passionate invocations’, both sought to ‘enter into communication with the dead’.11
These factors may have had a special relevance for women. In medieval Europe, as in ancient Greece, the care of deceased relatives and the preservation of their memories were – in private, at least – the responsibility of women. The custody of the dead was, in other words, part of a woman's family duties. One reason for the popularity of saints’ cults with medieval women may have been that they facilitated, and even fostered, the continuation of this customary female role. Perhaps most obviously, women visited local shrines to pray for the souls of their relatives – both living and dead.12 However, just as importantly, devotees were encouraged to visualise the saints as surrogate ancestors. In twelfth-century miracle accounts the saints were often cast in the role of spiritual kin: St Æbbe is described as ‘motherly’, both paternal and maternal traits are attributed to St Erkenwald, and St Frideswide of Oxford has been imagined as sister, daughter, bride, brother and mother all rolled into one.13 Given the similarities between medieval saints’ cults and pagan festivals of the dead, it would not be surprising if devotion to those whom Peter Brown called ‘the very special dead’ continued to be conveyed through the traditional female language of grief.14
This is not to claim, however, that this type of medieval religious expression was necessarily practised by all cult devotees at all places and times, or that hagiographers accurately recorded the ritual activities they observed. Indeed, it seems likely that the clerics and monks writing up miracle accounts would have set these popular practices within an appropriate Christian framework, and they may even have given undue emphasis to women's participation. Since there is very little reliable evidence for lamentation as a social practice in this period, this study focuses on the lament as a hagiographical discourse, examining some of the ways in which authors of miracle narratives drew on literary models in order to portray this form of popular devotion within recognised Christian boundaries. I also suggest that these customary practices and beliefs evolved into spiritual exercises performed by celebrated mystics in the later Middle Ages, although thirteenth- and fourteenth-century hagiographers, like their predecessors, often struggled to accommodate them within the aegis of acceptable religious observance and belief.
The purpose of this chapter, then, is to reassess the medieval hagiographical melodramas commented upon by Finucane and Hopper by framing them within a ritual, rather than in a psychological, context. With reference to miracle collections produced in England and France during the long twelfth century (c.1080–c.1200) it argues that, far from signifying spontaneous female hysteria, the volatile scenes depicted in hagiography represent ritualised performances with long-established cultural and literary precedents.
Much of the evidence for the lamentation practices mentioned above derives from descriptive narrative sources. Some of the best-known literary representations are found in Greek tragedy, such as Euripides’ The Trojan Women in which Hecuba heads a chorus of women lamenting the fall of Trojan heroes with weeping and wailing, cheek laceration and fainting.15 Such literary motifs were transmitted into the Latin medieval west where they seemingly became part of the general cultural currency. Indeed, modern scholars have argued that the classical lament informs a surprising range of medieval religious art and writing from the Pietà image to Augustine's Confessions and the letters of Abelard and Heloise.16 Nonetheless, it should also be recognised that medieval lamentation motifs were the product of wider cultural influences, such as the Old Testament which channelled a mixture of Middle Eastern ideas directly into the medieval world through the Psalms, the Book of Lamentation and David's Lament (2 Sam. 1:17–27).17 Indeed, sources for some early medieval planctus – lyrical compositions based on the classical Greek elegos – include Greek tragedy, the Old and New Testaments and the apocryphal gospels.18
Although passionate demonstrations of grief are not uncommon in early medieval narrative sources, these themes took on particular significance in the twelfth-century west with the development of a cultural movement which sought to explore emotional, soul-searching forms of expression through religion, literature and art.19 The planctus genre flourished in this intellectual climate, and it is perhaps no coincidence that it was during this period that authors of Latin miracle narratives describe the suffering and anguish of supplicants at saints’ shrines in far greater detail than had been the case in the past.20
The idea of lamentation, then, seems to have been very much in vogue in clerical culture during the twelfth century. However, this does not fully explain how largely pre-Christian themes from Greece, Asia Minor and the Middle East came to shape hagiographic conventions in the medieval west. In order to understand fully how lamentation motifs came to be adopted into the hagiographical canon and given Christian meaning, it is necessary to trace some of the literary processes at work in this cultural assimilation. A good starting point is the topos of the mourning mother, which appears to weave its way almost seamlessly from the ancient world into twelfth-century miracle stories and beyond.
Mothers were key mourners in the Greco-Romano and ancient Middle-Eastern worlds.21 In the medieval west, maternal grief retained its importance, and in early Christian writing it was symbolised by the Old Testament matriarch Rachel weeping for the sons of Israel. However, with the rise of Marian devotion in the twelfth century, Rachel seems to have been equated with, and then supplanted by, the Virgin Mary.22 At the same time gestures of grief, suffering and emotion were beginning to creep into visual images of Mary at the Crucifixion.23
Grieving mothers are a ubiquitous feature of miracle collections in twelfth-century England and France. In the Life and Miracles of William of Norwich, the story of William's murder in 1144 is carefully constructed to echo Christ's Passion: a literary artifice employed to bolster the claim that the boy was murdered by the Jews.24 William's mother is given a leading role, and is depicted lamenting her son's death in a manner reminiscent of the Virgin's lament in some forms of early medieval planctus: ‘with torn hair and clapping of hands she ran from one [bystander] to another weeping and wailing through the streets like a mad woman’.25
However, the trope of the lamenting mother more frequently appears in the context of miraculously resuscitated children. The Becket miracles are especially rich in examples. One account describes the grief of the Countess of Clare whose infant son is believed to have died of an unspecified illness. On returning home from church, the Countess is greeted with the terrible news of the baby's death. Her response is to snatch up her son's lifeless body, and she is described adopting the customary stance of the Pietà: she ‘raised his body in her hands, pressed it to her breast, cradled it in her arms’.26 The mother's emotional outburst is considered excessive by onlookers, and is juxtaposed with the more rational conduct of a male onlooker. Interestingly, this man happens to be the Countess's chaplain and, since this display of feminine grief is to prove an effective method of summoning divine help, we may assume that the narrator's sympathies lie with the bereaved Countess rather than with the disapproving representative of the Church. This is an important point to which this article will return.
In more general terms, men and women often approach death differently in miracle stories from this period: women with excessive emotion, and men with quiet restraint.27 This is highlighted in another Becket story featuring an eight-year-old reportedly drowned in a lake while playing in a quarry. His mother, we are told, vented her anguish publicly with weeping and lamentation (planctus), but his father grieved quietly and privately with sighs and groans.28 As a story in a contemporary French collection makes clear, ‘weeping and wailing’ (fletu et clamore) were considered unworthy of men.29
Where ‘dead’ children are concerned, lamentation seems an appropriate reaction. In miracle accounts, however, the topos is often extended to other, less obvious, situations. In the case of Henry of Hythe, the boy's mother is said to have ‘wept as if bereaved’ (tanquam orbata defleret), despite her son being very much alive. He is simply crippled.30 A more complex example is related by the Waltham chronicler. A pious woman, ‘truly a mother’ (vere mater), is portrayed lamenting over her ailing son in the abbey church. Readers are presented with a tableau suggestive of a customary death scene as the mother, standing weeping in the manner of the Virgin at the foot of the cross, heads a lament of female kin.31 It is as if the son is already dead. However, in this story there is no death, and no body to mourn. Instead of a bier, the lamenting women gather around the crucifix, and the focus of the lament has subtly shifted from a living, suffering son to the suffering, dying Christ.32
This change of perspective is crucial for understanding the mechanics of lamentation in miracle narratives in which women, petitioning a saint for a child's recovery, express themselves as mourners. This is made explicit in the story of the Countess of Clare in which a spoken lament, put into the Countess's mouth by the hagiographer, William of Canterbury, is incorporated into the narrative in much the same way as the planctus was inserted into medieval liturgical drama. The Countess's planctus includes a monologue addressed to the dead – in this instance to St Thomas – in rhetoric which has parallels to Greek funeral oration as detailed by Margaret Alexiou. Thus, the Countess bemoans her plight through a series of rhetorical questions, alternatively reproaching and beseeching the saint. Stylistic devices typical of lamentation are employed, such as the appropriation of a tripartite structure; motifs of praise and reproof; contrasts between past and present; and repeated refrains.33
St Thomas, once you returned my son to me; why did you resolve to return him, causing maternal grief? You healed the disease that caused him miserable tortures; woe is me, who has sinned; what command have I transgressed, that I am now condemned to bereavement? Return, holy martyr, him whom you returned. I vow that clothed in wool, barefoot, as an outcast, I will again seek your tomb in devotion. Return him whom you once returned to me.34
Significantly, the Countess appears to be grieving for her own fate as much as for that of her son. Her lament is for the self; it is an act of self-mourning.35 More precisely, the Countess is lamenting her sins, since it is implied that her past sinfulness is responsible for her current sorrow. In Christian terms, it is a lament for the soul, a soul metaphorically lost or dead.36 It should also be observed that the Countess offers to bargain her way out of her situation with an act of atonement. She promises that, should St Thomas grant her request, she will visit his shrine as an ‘outcast’ (abjecta), and in the manner and attire of one dead. As was common in the ancient Greek world, this medieval lamenter promises to undertake a rite of passage which parallels that of the departed soul.37
Although we are not told the details of the Countess's promised pilgrimage, it might be imagined with reference to an episode in another miracle account in which a noblewoman seeking a cure for blindness is described sitting before the portable reliquary of St Ursmer of Flanders. According to the narrative, this faithful devotee kept vigil both day and night, weeping and fasting, and holding a candle like a mourner: ‘As others laughed, she wept; as others sang, she mourned’.38 In this instance, lamentation is also a penance. The noblewoman's anguish, moreover, not only moves God to mercy, it also inspires compassion and devotion in others. This penitent has become an exemplum, setting a religious example not only to bystanders in the story, but also to listeners or readers of the text.
Miracle stories of the period are full of suppliants appealing to a saint through the ritual language of the lament, and – as Finucane and Hopper observed – the most vociferous of these lamenters are women. One way of examining this phenomenon more closely is by focusing on three key aspects of lamentation which have been recognised as the ‘generic signs of mourning’: weeping, wailing and violent gesticulations.39
Loud, public weeping is usually an intrinsic element of ritual lamentation. In the Greco-Roman tradition, weeping was seen as appropriate behaviour for women, not least because weeping was usually deemed unmanly.40 This is an opinion echoed in twelfth-century miracula; in one instance, a father who succumbs to weeping is said to have ‘put aside his manhood’.41 Another man derides weeping as womanly (muliebris).42 Aristotle had surmised that women were especially given to tears, and women in miracle narratives certainly seem to indulge in extraordinary amounts of weeping.43 Female flows are likened to springs and fountains in the Scriptural tradition, and their profusion is repeatedly marked by references to their prodigious volume and duration.44 One woman is reported as being so completely subsumed in her role as tear-shedder that she is referred to as ‘an instrument of lamentation’ (in lamentum conversum est organum).45
However, women's tears in these sources are far more than passive expressions of sorrow; they are also presented as a powerful intercessory force. A few well-placed wifely tears persuade the husband of one woman to consent to her pilgrimage, and the husband of another to ‘convert’ (convertere) to St Thomas.46 Since ritual weeping is usually recognised as a means of communicating with the dead, it is significant that intercessory tears are also targeted at saints in the stories.47 Examples include the woman who ‘conquered’ (vicit) St Frideswide with her tears, and the three blind women, lost and abandoned on a foreign shore, who weep in despair and are rewarded with a heaven-sent guide.48 On a more epic scale, the city of Mende is reportedly saved from destruction by the tears of mothers and virgins.49
Maternal lachrymosity is shown to be especially powerful. Weeping mothers seem to have an especially winning effect on the Virgin Mary: in the Rocamadour collection they save drowning men, ward off demons, restore sanity and even free captives.50 The language in these narratives echoes that of the Vulgate Old Testament describing Rachel weeping for the sons of Israel.51 Like Rachel, women in miracle accounts weep so forcefully that their tears are said to reach heaven.52
Women in these stories also weep for themselves, especially in the context of illness. The curative property of tears was well-known in the Middle Ages, and women – whose humoral constitutions were considered more fluid than men's – were especially thought to benefit from a good purgative sob.53 In miracle narratives, this is particularly evident in cures for blindness, where tears literally unblock the eyes and restore lost vision.54 Tears also cleanse the soul, as illustrated by Thomas of Monmouth's detailed report of a female sinner visiting William of Norwich's woodland chapel. As her fellow pilgrims step forward to make their devotions, the sinner's route is obstructed by an invisible force. Only when the woman's tears of repentance ‘flowed into the heavens’ (celis influit) is the impediment removed and the channel of divine communication re-opened.55 In miracle narratives, prayer and tears are a forceful combination, empowering women in particular to forge a path to God.
Lamentation is often a noisy, vocal affair, and this was no less true in the ancient world where tears came secondary to the eiulatio (ululation), the ‘throwing out’ of the voice in a high-pitched, wordless wail.56 In Euripides’ tragedy The Trojan Women, Hecuba called upon the deceased with her ‘wailings’; in this context, ritual cries had to be forceful enough to ‘wake the dead’.57
Although this aspect of the lament is less evident – and perhaps less tolerated – in the western Christian tradition, it seems to be present in the twelfth-century miracula as both an expression of suffering and as a dramatic appeal to the saints. Like a cripple appealing to St James at Reading Abbey, many women in these stories issue ‘the most piercing cries’ and ‘scream in all directions’.58 Although the clamour of a blind woman at the church at Rocamadour was allegedly so shrill and loud that she had to be hushed by the monks, an equally noisy woman at Malmesbury Abbey is described as winning praise from both men and God.59 Duration is often added to volume. The daughter of Aylward of Canterbury, for example, is said to have shrieked for two days.60 In the Becket miracles, female voices are fortified still further through the exercise of crying out en masse. One bereaved mother calls on her neighbours for vocal aid, and five widows add their efforts to the ululating (eiulare) of another.61 Like their tears, women's vocal exuberances are occasionally claimed as being so intense that they battered the gates of heaven.62
Despite the biblical injunction against female voices in church (1 Cor. 14:34–5), women in miracle narratives are said to fill sanctified places with their clamorous outpourings. If we are to believe Thomas of Monmouth, the priory church at Norwich must have been a particularly raucous place, reverberating with the cries of numerous sickly suppliants.63 Yet noisy emotionalism seems to have paid off, and in the narratives it is always rewarded with a cure. Whether despised or admired, persistently loud women were apparently hard to ignore. As in the case of the deaf and dumb Polilia, whose weeping and moaning were her sole methods of communication, this aspect of lamentation seems to have given women a ‘voice’, and in these texts it sometimes seems as if they made the most of it.64
In pre-Christian Greece, lamentation was accompanied by ‘emotive gestures of the body’ which included the tearing of hair, skin and clothes; the raising or beating of hands; and erratic running around.65 In the medieval west, similar ‘gestures of despair’ can be observed in visual art, liturgical drama and, as we have seen, in contemporary romance.66 They can also be found scattered throughout twelfth-century miracula, where their more extreme manifestations are often ascribed to women.
In the Miracula Sancti Erkenwaldi, compiled by a canon of St Paul's around 1140, the female inhabitants of a burning city – London – set up a lament. The details are revealing: with hair loose and clothes dishevelled, the women run here and there, beating their hands, weeping and ululating (eiulare) in a public show of grief strikingly reminiscent of Euripides’ lamenting Trojan women mentioned above. They are pleading with their saint to save their city in the manner of Old Testament lamenters.67
The hagiographer presents the women's actions as disorderly and confused, and juxtaposes this emotional reaction to the rational, calmer responses of men. The association of lamentation with irrational emotion, implied here, is a recurrent trope in western medieval texts. Chrétien de Troyes's grief-stricken Laudine, for example, is shown giving vent to emotional turmoil in a manner so violent that it appears to be verging on madness. Clawing her body, ripping her clothes and falling into a swoon, she is said to be ‘crazed with grief’.68
Similar behaviour in contemporary miracle narratives is sometimes more explicitly associated with madness. The twelfth-century appendix to Goscelin's St Ivo collection recounts the episode of a materfamilias attacked by a snake while sleeping in a meadow. The snake is depicted entering the victim's body through her mouth, at which point the woman awakes. In the narrative, the materfamilias replicates Laudine's behaviour almost gesture-for-gesture: ‘filling the heavens with loud cries, she showed her grief in her face, gesture and voice. She ripped her clothes, tore her hair, furrowed her face with her nails, tried to kill herself with her hands, and then fell to the ground’.69
Running around the meadows in disarray, the materfamilias is likened to a Bacchante by the narrator. This seemingly oblique reference to an obsolete Greek mystery cult is interesting. The bacchanal was originally a women's rite, popularly believed to be a form of ‘ritual madness’ whereby worshippers sought communion with the god Dionysius through the mind-altering state of ekstasis.70 Euripides’ tragedy The Bacchae, describes the terrible transformation which descends upon Agave, the daughter of Cadmus, as she sleeps in the open. Agave leaps up, and utters a ritual cry which signals to her fellow maenads the onset of madness.71 The same opening sequence is found in the St Ivo example. The materfamilias falls asleep – again outdoors – and, on waking, she cries aloud, alerting her companions. As the frenzy takes hold of her, the stricken woman – like Euripides’ maenads – runs about erratically, pulling at her hair and clothes, finally falling to the ground in a seizure.
Bacchic rites were little more than a cultural memory in Euripides’ day, but the playwright's strongly gendered version might be interpreted as an extreme variant of Greek ritual behaviour in which the cry of the mourner becomes the ololugé, the ‘shriek of ecstasy’.72 In Euripides’ play, ritual frenzy is also manifested by other tell-tale signs: maenads convulse their limbs, foam at the mouth, roll their eyes, attack those around them with superhuman strength and are represented as being literally possessed by the god who ‘enters the bodies’ of his devotees, causing their madness.73 Although there is no evidence that Euripides’ play was known in Europe before the fourteenth century, the characteristic traits of Dionysiac possession were recognised, commented upon and given demonic connotations by the Church Fathers.74 It may be more than mere coincidence that Euripides’ vision of ritual madness has parallels in twelfth-century hagiographical accounts of demonic possession, such as the St Ivo story in which the materfamilias's behaviour is said to be caused by Satan entering her body in the form of a snake.75
Possessed behaviour not only appears in the context of illness and madness in miracle accounts, it also has wider uses. It is particularly instructive, for example, to compare the stories of two women ‘cured’ by William of Norwich as related by Thomas of Monmouth. The first woman is apparently possessed by a demon, and is dragged kicking and screaming into Norwich cathedral. Her symptoms include loud and terrible cries, feet-drumming, clothes-tearing and a final collapse into sleep.76 The second woman is the tearful penitent barred entry to William of Norwich's woodland shrine, mentioned above. Strikingly, Thomas seems to re-use the same ‘possession’ formula to describe the penitent's behaviour although, as we are well aware, this particular protagonist is no demoniac. She is merely a sinner apparently seeking communion with the divine through a ritual performance suggestive of mind-losing behaviour.77 Given that the symptomatic characteristics of lamentation, madness, demonic possession and penitence appear to be indistinguishable in many of these stories, the line drawn by hagiographers between ritual expression and madness often seems to be perilously thin.
Writers of miracle accounts, then, generally seem to have approved of excessive weeping and wailing at saints’ shrines, and sometimes even depict more radical forms of ritual behaviour as spiritually beneficial. However, this enthusiastic adoption of lamentation motifs into the hagiographical canon poses something of a puzzle, because scholars frequently point out that Christian theologians repeatedly denounced, and legislated against, noisy demonstrations of grief. Lamentation was literally a far cry from the quiet sobriety of Christian worship recommended by the early Church, and patristic texts often condemned these popular activities as pagan, irrational and ‘effeminate’.78 John Chrysostom, for example, was particularly vehement in this respect, and likened female lamenters to Bacchic revellers.79 Although the gradual Christianisation of death rituals slowly removed many pagan elements from official worship, there remained a lingering fear that these practices continued in private.80 In the eleventh century, Burchard of Worms's Decretum still expressed anxieties concerning rowdy funerals, and an English miracle story records the divine punishment meted out to funeral attendees who unwisely lamented ‘in the manner of Bacchantes’ (ritu bachantium).81
Historians considering this issue for other periods frequently link the disapproval of popular lamentation with the fear of civil unrest.82 It is sometimes suggested that it was the act of taking the lament outside onto the streets – rather than the lament itself – which triggered political tension. In this respect, it is perhaps significant that, in miracle accounts, a distinction is made between unregulated expressions of grief – for example, at ‘popular’ funerals – and those channelled towards Christian ends under the watchful eyes of cult authorities. This can be illustrated by returning to William of Norwich's mother, described by Thomas of Monmouth as lamenting her son's death ‘through the streets and open places’ (per vicos et plateas). Unmistakably, this is a voice of female protest, aimed to whip up emotion and support for what may well have turned into a popular vendetta against the Jews. It is notable that Thomas is uncomfortable about this public display which he refers to as ‘womanly’ (muliebris), ‘rash’ (temerarius) and ‘mad’ (amens).83 The text goes on to reveal how these volatile emotions are directed away from the streets and into a supervised cult, and the next time lamentation motifs appear, it is in the relatively benign context of official ritual devotion, as mentioned above.
With reference to late Antiquity, Peter Brown envisaged the cult of saints as aiding the process of social cohesion by channelling the aspirations of ‘potentially disruptive’ elements into an all-embracing Christian culture.84 Although Brown and other scholars have also imagined saints’ cults as places where ‘popular’ beliefs successfully fused with formal Christian practice, the process of incorporating some of the more difficult and tenacious forms of popular culture, such as lamentation, into authorised religious practice would always be problematic. This might be exemplified by the figure of Margery Kempe, a pious fifteenth-century laywoman from Lynn in Norfolk, today renowned for her extensive pilgrimages and her exuberant style of devotion. Margery's religious enthusiasm – manifested through much the same type of behaviour as seen in miracle accounts – seems to have been regarded by her contemporaries both as a public nuisance and also as a sign of true piety. Again, context is everything. Reading between the lines of Margery's autobiographical ‘Book’, it is invariably Margery's unsupervised, public displays of religiosity, rather than those overseen in private by her confessors and other figures of authority, which rouse suspicions of demonic possession and non-conformist dissent.85
Margery Kempe's fanatical emotionalism was inspired by saintly precedents as much as by popular culture because, by the fifteenth century, weeping, wailing and erratic gesticulations had taken on new importance with the development of affective female piety, especially in the Low Countries and Italy.86 Hagiography from this later period not only portrays female mystics adopting some very familiar devotional habits, it also shows these practices being exercised to heroic extremes.
Although weeping became an important stage in the spiritual development of both men and women, some of the most fanatical late-medieval weepers seem to have been female. In female saints’ Lives, tears are shed even more profusely than in miracle accounts: in the Life of the Beguine Marie de Oignies, for instance, the biblical ‘fountain’ becomes a ‘river’ (fluvius) as Marie's tears collect in a muddy puddle at her feet.87 Intercessory weeping is often taken a stage further in these texts. Catherine of Siena, said to speak to Christ ‘more by way of tears than with her lips’, is described not only weeping for her family but also for strangers and sinners.88 Penitential tears equally are wept on a higher level, with occasional echoes back to twelfth-century hagiography. Like the penitent noblewoman weeping beside St Ursmer's relics, the ever-tearful Catherine is likened to Mary Magdalene, and both women are said to weep copiously, despite living blameless and pious lives.89
Noisy expressions of grief similarly develop into a female religious virtue in the later Middle Ages. One of the most vocal of all pious celebrities was the Flemish mystic Christina Mirabilis who, according to Thomas de Cantimpré, shouted ‘louder than anyone we have known’.90 Margery Kempe famously ‘roared’ on and off for ten years, and Marie de Oignies was famed for her spontaneous wailing, especially when in rapture.91 The theme of noisy women in church continues; in their respective Lives, Catherine of Siena has to be hushed by a priest, and Marie de Oignies absents herself from the presence of other worshippers for fear of upsetting them.92 Marie's hagiographer, Jacques de Vitry, explains that the closer Marie drew to God, the louder she became. Nearing death, she opened her throat and issued a high-pitched cry which she kept up, almost continuously, for three days.93
By the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, erratic ‘gestures of despair’ had also become a part of female spirituality, and were lauded as signs of divine grace or as a mystical dance.94 When performed by Beatrice of Nazareth, they seemingly involved ‘gesturing’ (gestiens) and the striking of her body; when executed by Lutgard of Aywiéres, they included rapid running about, to and fro.95 Mind-losing behaviour often results in fainting and rapture in these accounts. In a state she referred to as madness (orewoet), the Flemish mystic Hadewijch regularly found herself rapt from her bed and physical pain for days at a time.96 The joyous Beatrice of Nazareth also seems to have embraced madness as a spiritual asset; in her Life, insania becomes one of the seven stages of loving God.97
Beatrice's madness was cleverly presented by her hagiographer as insania amoris, which drew the desiring soul towards God in an acceptable way. However, no such artifice glosses the story of the thirteenth-century ‘village lunatic’, Christina Mirabilis.98 Suspected of being a demoniac, but actually claiming to be ‘rapt in spirit’, Christina is described taking to the woods like a madwoman, undergoing rituals of self-harm, leaping around convulsively, rolling on the ground, contorting her limbs and talking to the dead.99 Christina's hagiographer asserted that her strange proclivities were signs of piety, but in the thirteenth century – as at other times – this type of female behaviour was always going to be problematic, if not downright risky.100
This study of lamentation motifs in twelfth-century hagiography seems to pose a question rarely raised by modern scholars: to what extent are the gendered activities depicted in hagiography realistic reflections of women's devotional activities rather than the literary products of conventional motifs? Although a discussion about the relationship between cultural practices and religious representations of those practices is beyond the scope of this chapter, a clue may be given by Margery Kempe. Margery, it may be recalled, self-consciously styled herself on female role models whose stories and reputations were, in turn, heavily dependent on – as we have discovered – an interconnecting chain of exemplars stretching back into the past. As Margery's story suggests, women with pious aspirations must often have tried to shape their lived reality as closely as possible around Christian ideals. To some extent, real life experiences and exemplary fictional ones must have been mutually inspiring and reinforcing, so that they culturally influenced one another in a variety of ways.
Although lamentation motifs are not exclusive to women's stories in medieval hagiography, it is significant that the more extreme manifestations of affective piety are usually attributed to them. This may be explained, in part, by cultural tradition: in the Christian west, gestures of mourning and suffering were especially associated with women. What is especially interesting, however, is that the body language of lamentation seems to empower women with a certain degree of religious agency in miracle accounts, and it is this aspect of lamentation which finds its fullest expression in some mystical forms of female spirituality in the late Middle Ages.
In the 1980s, Caroline Walker Bynum famously drew scholars’ attention to the emotional and body-orientated piety depicted in female saints’ vitae in the later Middle Ages, arguing that the feminine body often provided ‘a means of access to the divine’.101 In considering this gendered phenomenon in a wider social and historical context, this chapter has found evidence to suggest that this form of affective piety did not spring into existence from nowhere around 1200 as scholars are often led to suppose.102 On the contrary, it is likely that these particular late-medieval religious motifs had a long, and surprisingly well-attested, cultural pedigree.
The author would like to thank Henrietta Leyser for her helpful comments on an earlier version of this article, and special thanks are due to Sue Morgan and Joanna de Groot for organising the Gender and Religion Colloquium upon which this Special Issue of Gender & History is based.