By Jia Tolentino
Writer
In the summer of 2019, I flew to France with my friend Emma for a trip bookended by my waking up with an infection urinaire on our first morning and having a wasp sting me inside my open mouth on the last night. The week between, though, was a sweet and lazy river—a stained-glass honeyed-sunlight fields-and-castles reverie. We drove aimlessly around Normandy, reading out loud from poorly translated guidebooks. One night, under a silvery twilight that was reflected in the slowly rising water around our paved walkway, we carried our bags to Mont-Saint-Michel, the surreal tidal island and former medieval monastery. There was just one tiny inn within the island itself, and so it fell silent once the sky darkened and the throngs of people flooded out. We wandered, stoned and quiet, through chapels and gardens. I was transfixed by a graveyard where the cold monuments seemed to cry and flower and reach for the sky.
Emma and I had been talking about what it might have been like to live in a monastery. I had been thinking about the ahistorical gift of self-determination, of being a woman who had spent much of her twenties writing all day and all night. In a place like Mont-Saint-Michel, where the stones themselves seemed held together by history, it felt especially tangible that—despite my well-practiced complaints about the various immoral and destructive aspects of contemporary living—my entire existence was an unlikely luxury. If I were to disappear and reappear at a random place on the fabric of planetary space-time, I had a high chance of materializing as a subsistence farmer in an era before antibiotics: a woman married off mid-puberty, with no books in the house, no access to solitude, and little in the way of sexual or reproductive choice.
We went back to the inn and sat on the balcony, looking at the walkway snaking out into the dark. On the mountain, you could see anything coming from miles away. You could prepare a loving welcome. You could mount a defense. That summer, I was on the precipice of switching my psychological orientation toward pregnancy from aversion to desire—I had been walking slowly, for years, toward a door I would soon knock on in the dark.
I was in gentle, preemptive mourning for my life of impulsivity and consciously wielded independence. In that moment, wearing the black night like a blanket, I felt a new understanding of what religious consecration meant for women in bygone centuries: it was a way—perhaps the only sanctioned way—to receive freedom from pregnancy, labor, and childrearing. It was a way to never live in service of babies or of men. I had nursed an obsession with medieval female mystics for years, admiring them primarily as writers. But I saw then that I loved them—Julian of Norwich, Hildegard of Bingen, Catherine of Siena, Clare of Assisi, Margery Kempe, and others—for finding a way to do, so many years ago, what so many women in our era of deceptive bounty still dream of. They had built unbreachable stone walls around the things that were most precious to them: their faith, yes, but also their time, their minds, their intuition.
The scholar Monica Furlong writes that, for a medieval woman, life generally “began with a limited, often purely domestic, education, followed by marriage in the mid-teens or earlier...the marriage would be followed by repeated pregnancies and the births of many children.” Childbirth, back then, was an event that wore a strong association with death. Furlong cites Catherine of Siena, the fourteenth-century Italian mystic, as an example: Catherine was the twenty-fourth of twenty-five children, half of whom had died by the time she was born. Catherine was one of premature twins when she was born in 1347. By this point, half of her twenty-two other siblings had already died; soon afterwards, Catherine’s twin died too.
She was fifteen when her sister Bonaventura died during labor and the duty to marry Bonaventura’s widower summarily fell to her. But Catherine refused, cutting off her hair and going on a hunger strike. As she later told her friend and mentor Raymond of Capua, she built a cell in her own mind from which she could not flee. She began living as a recluse in her family’s home and then turned, radically, toward a life of outward-facing public service: she became a preacher and a reformer, rejecting the other roles that were available to her, finding a choice beyond living as a mother or a nun.
When Catherine was around thirty—three years before she would die, weakened by a lifetime of extreme fasting—she entered an ecstatic state of communion with God. The theology that emerged was simple and psychedelic: God was life itself—a sea in which we were all fish. “Every step of the way to heaven is heaven,” she wrote.
A few female mystics had to carve out a path within the bounds of marriage. Margery Kempe, the author of the first autobiography in English, had over a dozen children with her husband before convincing him to swear to mutual celibacy. Her mystical conversion began after the birth of her first child in the late 1390s, which prompted months of terrifying hallucinations. It was solidified in 1413, when she visited an elderly Julian of Norwich, who assured Kempe that her visions of God were real.
Julian was an anchoress—she had taken a vow, as a young adult, to permanently enclose herself in a doorless cell attached to a church. When anchorites were enclosed, they would receive the sacrament of the dying; when they died, the windows in their cells would simply be sealed. In exchange for this, they received a profound and formal religious authority—in church hierarchy, none were above them except the bishop. Most anchorites were anchoresses; in the thirteenth century, women in anchor-holds outnumbered men four to one.
Julian was born in the middle of the fourteenth century in England and witnessed the Black Death as a young child. Little is known about her otherwise—even her last name is lost to history—and she is the mystic I have always loved most. The force of her theological vision is thunderous and overwhelming, a fullness more remarkable given the absolute attenuation of her surroundings: you picture the meals slipped in through the window, the solitary pacing, the entire world compressed to four walls.
Her great revelations occurred when she was around thirty, when a bout of sickness brought her close to death. For Julian and many other female mystics, Furlong writes, “the cost of becoming visible and audible, of taking a path with no role model walking ahead, was considerable, and the women paid for it.” The knowledge that they sought was the type of knowledge that can only come through being alone, through allowing themselves to be shattered: this was the path, after all, that Jesus himself had taken to the cross.
Like Catherine, many of the female mystics practiced severe asceticism. Clare of Assisi, born in Italy at the end of the twelfth century, governed her order of nuns, the Poor Clares, with an extreme vow of poverty that doubled as an assertion of equality. As the scholar Elizabeth Alvilda Petroff writes, Clare believed that “she and her sisters could support themselves, as Christ’s followers did in the gospels, by the work of their hands and by begging alms; she did not believe that women had to be supported economically by others, and she did not want to own property and live off its income.” To demonstrate that women needed no special coddling, the Poor Clares went barefoot in winter and slept on the ground. “The physical austerities undergone by women mystics, and that young women often imposed on themselves, underscored society’s need to control and purify the female body,” Petroff writes. “But in the case of women who were put away in the religious life, something unexpected happened. The very techniques of prayer and meditation that were supposed to reinforce the withdrawal of a religious woman, to ‘contain and suppress’ the body, turned into a powerful force that made women potent visionaries.”
These mystics are one of my last strands of connection to the religion I grew up with—these women, and their irradiating desire to search for something beyond the visible, some access to a kaleidoscoping realm of presence and love and terror. That desire has filtered through to me, though I’ve followed it in such ordinary contexts, seeking out bouts of extreme solitude and overwhelming physical experience, in the midst of what is an otherwise profoundly conventional life. I feel stunned by the lack of compromise in the lives of these mystics, the clarity of their intuition. Particularly in this respect: they repudiated motherhood personally but valorized it theologically. They “manipulated the dominant tradition to free themselves from the burdens of fertility yet made female fertility a powerful symbol,” the scholar Caroline Walker Bynum writes. They conceived of Christ’s body in female terms: it bled, it gave new life through its blood, it transfigured itself into food. After all, God had made the womb the foundation of his essential salvific miracle; after all, Jesus’s most divine act is profoundly analogous to a mother’s labor. “For when the hour of your delivery came,” the thirteenth-century mystic Marguerite of d’Oingt wrote, “you were placed on the hard bed of the cross...your nerves and all your veins were broken.” Julian wrote down a vision of God expressing the kind of sacrificial love that is knit into a mother before she ever meets her child, as the agony of pregnancy and childbirth is subsumed into hope that her creation will be safe, will be saved. “If I could suffer more,” Julian heard God saying, “I would suffer more.”
Six months after that trip to France, I got pregnant, and then two months later, the pandemic took hold. My boyfriend and I relocated to Upstate New York, to the house we’d bought after I sold my book. I had formerly associated solitude with stretches of psychedelic loneliness or furious writing; I had always craved isolation as the equivalent of a dark room, a sort of temporary anchor-hold, in which my thoughts would flare like lighted matches. But there was nothing like that in pandemic isolation: no sparks, no sharpness. Isolation in the woods, with trees and space and sunlight—this was another instance of ahistorical, arbitrary, undeserved luck. As my body expanded, I felt like a slowly growing plant, like a strong and sweet and capacious animal. I stopped writing and felt myself moving toward a different kind of knowledge, one that required not force and sharpness but instead surrender, patience, the willingness to be a vessel for time.
I began to understand that this was part of what the medieval female mystics had intuited. In studying these women, I had always seen—and identified with—primarily a tormenting, salvific, internally generated desire to render thoughts onto paper. Peter Dronke writes that the “medieval woman’s motivation for writing at all seems rarely to be predominantly literary: it is often more urgently serious than is common among men writers; it is a response springing from inner needs, more than from an artistic, or didactic, inclination.” But their openness to revelation had left them open to the truth about it: that transformative experience is rarely entirely legible right away. When Julian of Norwich first wrote down her visions of God soon after she experienced them, she excluded certain scenes because she knew she didn’t yet grasp the nature of what she’d seen. Around fifteen years later, she began to understand what had been revealed to her, and then five years later, in 1393—twenty years after the revelations—she wrote everything down in full.
Was it hard for Julian to wait? From the solitude of her anchor-hold—from within the days that must have sometimes lasted forever—how many times did she try to capture her visions and then fail? Did she trust that labor would lead to epiphany? Hildegard of Bingen, the polymathic twelfth-century German mystic and abbess, described revelation as a sort of transcendent birth: “I saw a mystic and wondrous vision, such that all my womb was convulsed and my body’s sensory powers were extinguished, because my knowledge was transmuted into another mode, as if I no longer knew myself.” When I was on the hospital bed, I was surprised to find that I had no impatience in me, not one spike of it through twenty-four hours of contractions. I was still timid from the pandemic, maybe—it was months before the vaccines would start to free us—but this was the first time in my life that I knew, absolutely, that revelation would arrive.
I held on to that certainty through the early months with my baby, in the many moments when I felt rage burn through me: I was so depleted, I wanted to be alone again, I wanted silence and a blank page and an unstoppable urge to fill it. But I knew that I wasn’t denying myself the tug of my intuition, which had led me over the last decade to fiercely protect my autonomy in a way that made me sure it felt right to—at least temporarily, or intermittently, or partially—give it up.
The mystics had followed their love wherever it led them: to self-effacement, to self-determination, to both intertwined. Clare of Assisi died in 1253, two days after a papal bull certified her rule for her religious community—the first time a woman’s rule had ever received approval from the Pope. It’s reported that Clare’s final words were “Blessed be You, O God, for having created me.”