5

LANGUAGE, LITERACY, AND THE SAINTLY BODY

 

Many years before Lutgard’s death, Thomas approached some nuns and lay brothers in order to arrange for the disposal of her relics should she die during his absence. Thomas wanted her hand as “a sacred memorial” (sacram memoriam). Abbess Hadewijch agreed to his request. However, Thomas writes, repeating a medieval misogynistic commonplace, “Since it is women’s nature (natura) to be unable to keep secrets (as the vernacular proverb says, ‘be quiet, woman—if you can’), the nuns told Lutgard how I had ordered her hand to be cut off.”1

There follows a scene that demonstrates Lutgard’s wit and authority with a vividness unprecedented in the Life. Thomas, who had just pled for the silence of woman, portrays himself coming to Aywières in order to answer to Lutgard for his presumption. Their speech turns quickly into a gentle duel. Thomas casts the scene as a kind of gruesome hohe Minne, one in which the castle is an abbey and the noble knight of God, who asks for the (dead) hand of his heroine, is granted only a small finger after proving himself with the labor of his writing, a token accepted as a sufficient reward for his ardor.

Making the first thrust in their conversation, Lutgard turns to him with a serious expression and says, “I have heard, dearest son (fili carissime), that you are already planning to cut off my hand after I die (manum mihi post mortem abscindere jam disponis). I cannot imagine (multum miror) what you plan to do with my hand!” Thomas, blushing (rubore perfusus), responds, “I believe your hand would be good for my soul and body (bonum animæ & corporis), if I manage to get it—as I intend (si eam consequar, ut intendo).” After temporarily retreating, Thomas quickly recovers to boldly reassert his wish.2

Although the language of the passage contrasts Lutgard’s baffled “wonder” with Thomas’s intentional “pursuit” (consequar), Thomas is not in control of the situation; Lutgard seems to be teasing him, displaying what he seeks and cannot have. “Serenely smiling,” she places her finger into Thomas’s view; it rises into the narrative field of vision, punctuating the scene of conversation with its still presence: “She laid the little finger of her right hand on the windowsill where we were speaking and said, ‘It will be enough for you if you are able to have this finger after my death” (Tunc illa, sereno, ut erat, vultu subridens, & auricularium digitum dextræ manus in subliminari fenestræ, in qua colloquebamur deponens, Satis, inquit, tibi sufficiet, cum istum digitum post mortem meam habere potueris). Gaining confidence (confidentius), Thomas, echoing Lutgard’s words, offers subtle flattery while insisting on his original aim: “No part of your body could be enough for me, mother (Nihil, inquam, mihi ex tuo, Mater, corpore sufficere poterit), unless I had your hand or head to comfort (relever) me when I am bereft (orbatus) of your whole self.” The comfort provided by the relic, as the verb suggests, is a lifting up, a kind of resurrection, giving back to Thomas the presence of Lutgard, whom death had stolen.3

The little finger that Lutgard laid on the windowsill was later removed, fulfilling her prediction. Thomas attempted to retrieve the relic as promised by Hadewijch but was refused, as she realized that some mutually beneficial negotiations were possible. So Thomas made another journey to Aywières, promising the abbess that he would write Lutgard’s Life in exchange for “the gift I desired (optatum) more than gold and silver.”4

For Alexandra Barratt, Thomas’s anecdote displays the dichotomy of language and the body that she sees operating throughout the vita. It was, she argues, “across [Lutgard’s] mute and speechless body that her Latin life was negotiated.” Text was exchanged for body, a body whose gestures, raptures, and silence provide female substitutes for linguistic competence in that very text.5 For Barratt, the anecdote of Lutgard’s finger is representative of the vita’s general attitude toward women. Lutgard’s silence demonstrates her transcendence of her feminine nature (like the cessation of her menstruation and so overcoming the curse given to “tame the pride of Eve”) that, according to the proverb invoked by Thomas, makes it difficult for a woman to remain quiet. In Barratt’s view, Lutgard was (despite her winning way with words in this passage) a “mute body” insofar as it is her dead flesh that motivates Thomas to write her Life. Furthermore, she is figured as illiterate and capable of expression primarily through gestural rather than verbal means. The literate Thomas thus contrasts with the illiterate Lutgard, whose image he sculpts through the illiteracy topos, a feature that Barratt sees as “crucial to the demonstration of her sanctity.”6

In the previous chapter, I argued that in Thomas’s description of Hugolino’s conversion from blasphemy—the other tale of a finger and a Life—Thomas implicitly equates Marie’s relic and vita. Hugolino’s story portrays the power of Marie’s vita as metonymic, an instrument of grace that confers the immediacy of the saint’s presence in a way that parallels her relic, providing an instantaneous and irresistible cure. In contrast, the Vita Lutgardis depicts hagiography as rhetorical: reader and writer enter a situation of persuasion and interpretation that Thomas acknowledges has uncertain outcomes. At stake is whether readers will “take up” (suscipiant) Lutgard as an “exemplum.” This taking up, I argued, is conducted through reading. The reader is a necessary partner in the author’s work of persuasion. However, Thomas also believed that “suspicion” of the wondrous and novel nature of his subject could compromise readers’ capacity to “take up” his text. He attempted to assist his audience by theorizing the act of reading. The prologue shows that the reader reads this book in order to learn how to read.

As the figure whose exemplarity manifests itself to readers only through a complex hermeneutics, it would seem that Lutgard herself should model the ideal reader. Why, then, would a text so self-consciously concerned with inculcating proper reading practices portray its saintly example as illiterate?

In this chapter, I will argue that despite this depiction of Lutgard as illiterate, a portrait that, according to Barrett, depends on a gendered dichotomization of text and body, male literacy and female illiteracy, the picture when read in its totality is more complex than Barratt suggests. As Barratt acknowledges, the Life demonstrates a fundamental ambiguity about Lutgard’s literacy as she shifts among what Barratt considers incompatible relations to Latinity and language more broadly: a “sense pervades [Thomas’s] text of an uneasy and paradoxical relation between Lutgard, language, and languages, of which Thomas himself fails to make sense.”7 On the one hand, Thomas has Lutgard confess herself to be an “unlettered, uncultivated, and uneducated nun” (idiotae et rusticae et laicae moniali),8 and Thomas calls her “rather uncultivated (rudis) and very simple (simplicissima) in common speech.”9 Elsewhere he makes her abjectly dependent on the learned fellow nun Sybille de Gages for the interpretation of scripture and her own visionary experiences, such that Lutgard almost becomes the incidental channel for divine presence, her mind irrelevant to her sanctity.10 On the other hand, Thomas depicts Lutgard as capable of expert interpretation of divine messages, whether by virtue of miraculous intervention or by her own successful engagement with the ruminative meditation on and allegorical interpretation of visions.11

It is not sufficient to hold that this ambiguity in Thomas’s representation of Lutgard’s relation to language is merely an ungenerative contradiction. Nor should we collapse the tension between literacy and illiteracy by prioritizing Thomas’s representation of Lutgard as illiterate, indelibly marked as one having “trouble with language,” while ignoring the ways in which he presents her as a skilled reader. While Barratt is correct to note that Thomas’s presentation of Lutgard’s literary and linguistic activity is multifaceted, rather than assume that his portrait is rendered sloppy by his misogynistic assumptions, we should ask what work his representation of Lutgard as simultaneously illiterate and literate performs in the text.12 What does Thomas’s narrative stand to gain in its construal of Lutgard’s relation to language, textuality, and embodiment?

In what follows I will argue that Thomas’s representation of Lutgard’s relation to literacy makes sense only when we contextualize the vita within a tradition of Cistercian views—particularly as articulated by William of Saint-Thierry—on the practice and outcome of reading scripture.13 Thomas’s representation of Lutgard extensively draws on Cistercian traditions of exegeting the Song of Songs, where the application of lectio divina to the reading of the Song is articulated with great care. In the Cistercian understanding of scriptural reading, exegetical acts, which issue in a performance of the text within the body and the affect of the reader, recapitulate and fulfill the scriptural text by making it present in history. The reader ideally becomes the bride of the Song, inhabiting and being inhabited by her words and her desires so that the reader might share in her relationship with the groom, who is Christ. Thomas uses William’s Exposition on the Song of Songs in order both to portray, in a hagiographical mode, a Cistercian theology of reading and to fashion an image of a Cistercian saint who is conformed to the likeness of the bride of the Song of Songs.14 The literacy and illiteracy topoi function, I will argue, as literary strategies meant to form an image of Lutgard as an exemplary reader, but one who reads according to Cistercian ideals. The Cistercian notion of what it is to read scripture thus offers a key to understanding Thomas’s seemingly contradictory representation of Lutgard as illiterate and yet also a masterful reader.15

LITTERATUS-ILLITTERATUS AND THE TOPOS OF THE ILLITERATE HOLY WOMAN IN THE MIDDLE AGES

The ambiguities surrounding female literacy are not unique to this vita. Scholarly engagement with the question of medieval literacy, particularly in relation to women, is ongoing and elaborate, complicated by shifting terminology related to literacy in the high-medieval period.16

The adjective laica, so often applied to Lutgard, can be understood as a substitute for illitterata. Over the course of the medieval period, the Roman antithesis between illitteratus and litteratus was aligned with a distinction between laicus and clericus.17 The association of the clerical caste with the literate, meaning those who had the ability to read Latin, was a means for the clergy to institute their privileged status over and against an illiterate laity. By the twelfth century, however, the distinction did not necessarily correspond to the ordained and lay states; a knight who was literate could be called clericus, while a priest who was illiterate could be termed laicus.18 “Idiots” were those who could speak only their mother tongue; the Lexicon des Papias, ca. 1050, defines idiota as “propria vel rustica lingua contentus.”19

Thus, despite the deployment of the classic antithesis of litterata/illitterata and the related terms rustica, idiota, and laica to describe Lutgard, Thomas’s representation of her relation to language cannot be summed up by neat terminological considerations, as the distinctions suggested by these terms became increasingly imprecise in the high Middle Ages. Furthermore, as Walter Simons’s work indicates, the gravitational force exercised by Latin began to give way to the vernacular in the Southern Low Countries in the twelfth century. The effects of this shift can be seen not only in the secular urban schools training future citizens for the new economy but also in devotional contexts. Lambert le Bègue’s (d. 1177) trial documents reveal that practices of lectio divina were emerging from the monastery in the twelfth century and being taken up by the laity. His followers read portions of vernacularized scripture with techniques derived from monastic practice.20 Writing in the midst of this shift, Thomas’s depiction of a nun born of a merchant father in the important town of Tongeren—and thus a woman certainly educated in vernacular literacy who, furthermore, became a nun in an order that highly valued Latin literacy—renders the terminological terrain more ambiguous.

Nuns living in the convents of the region would have been beneficiaries the availability of education to children, male and female, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. As I noted in chapter 1, accessibility to education in reading, writing, and arithmetic was encouraged by the rising merchant class, which, beginning in the twelfth century, wrested exclusive pedagogical control away from the church; even cities provided subsidies for impoverished elementary-school-aged children in many urban centers. These schools were typically coed, and even when differentiated by gender, there was no apparent difference between levels of education. When a gendered difference in education did appear, it was at the higher levels. Most girls did not become fluent in Latin, although there were some schools dedicated to the higher education of women, and further teaching in Latin would have occurred when a woman entered a convent.21 An ability to read and write the vernacular was thus deemed important for both genders in the Southern Low Countries.

The primary addressees of Lutgard’s Life, the nuns of Aywières who commissioned the vita and, more broadly, the “nuns of Brabant,”22 like nuns at all Cistercian convents, given the great concern for uniformity of practice within the order, would have undertaken the same liturgical practices as Lutgard, practices that included the reading and singing of the Psalms and other prayers during the eight offices of the day, daily Mass, and the extra liturgical offices on feast days and at burials.23 A fairly high level of Latin would be required to fulfill these daily liturgical tasks.24 There would, however, be gradations of literacy in a convent, as Thomas shows in his portrayal of the magis litterata Sybille de Gages.

With the increasing attenuation of the division between male and female levels of education, use of the illiteracy topos became arguably more desirable for male clerics as a rhetorical means for defining gender difference. Anke Passenier has shown how, when applied to “simple” holy women, the illiterata topos was used in the thirteenth century to create a distinction between religious women (particularly, for Passenier’s interests, Beguines), whose knowledge came from a divine source, and clerics, who learned through books.25 Such a division of authority functioned in two ways. Some, like Robert of Sorbonne, favorably compared Beguine simplicity to the learnedness of the clerics. He said that on the Day of Judgment, a simple Beguine would have more assurance of her salvation than a learned theologian or magistrate.26 The topos, however, also served to protect the priestly sphere of authority from the encroachment of the mulieres religiosae. By emphasizing the charismatic nature of women’s authority, rather than that derived ex officio (an office increasingly obtained through accreditation by a male-only university), clerics protected themselves from female intrusion into their privileged space.27

Furthering the observation made by Anke Passenier that vitae often contrast learning through experience with book learning, Anneke B. Mulder-Bakker and Liz Herbert McAvoy have explored in depth the relation between learning from experience and the topos of the illiterate woman in thirteenth-century hagiography. They note that male hagiographers of this period often described their female subjects as learning through trial and error (experimento docta) in relation to their depiction as illitterata.28 While men produced and expounded on written materials, having been trained from the twelfth century onward in the university, women were “experts in nonintellectual, experiential ways of knowing.”29 Rather than reading, women were said to learn from the “book of experience,” as in the vita of the anchoress Yvette of Huy (d. 1228) by Hugh of Floreffe, a Premonstratensian canon who wrote that “events taught her rather than words as she learned from the book of experience” (rebus potius, quam verbis edocta, prout in libro experientiae didicerat).30 In the case of religious wisdom, knowledge was said to be divinely infused, as in Beatrice of Nazareth’s Latin Life, and imprinted on the body in states of ecstasy.31 Thus, the notion that women know through experience, whether of the quotidian or exalted spiritual variety, was buttressed by the medieval association of women with the body.32

Insofar as my consideration of the performative nature of monastic reading undermines the distinction between textuality and experience or textuality and materiality, my argument bears a family resemblance to Mulder-Bakker and McAvoy’s observation in Women and Experience that the dichotomy between learning by the book and by experience as presented in many late-medieval vitae is undermined by information within those same texts; women who are said to be unable to read are also shown to be reading, writing, and teaching others, in part through the authority and knowledge they are said to garner from experience. Mulder-Bakker and McAvoy’s concern is to undermine the distinction between illiteracy as knowing by experience and literacy as book learning (whether in the vernacular or in Latin); they show that women of experience do, in fact, produce literature. They treat experience as prior to textual production, which is understood to express experience, however, a view that is incompatible with the performativity of the Cistercian notion of reading as articulated by authors examined here. In order to understand the relation of reading and embodiment in the Vita Lutgardis, then, that question must be considered in light of its Cistercian conceptualization.

“THAT WHAT WE READ MAY BE PERFORMED IN US”: READING IN A MONASTIC MILIEU

The taproot of the Cistercian conception of monastic reading is Origen of Alexandria (d. ca. 254). Jean Leclercq notes, “In every period of place where there was a monastic renewal, there was a revival of Origen.” The library at Clairvaux under Bernard contained eight manuscripts of Origen’s work, including On First Principles (De principiis; Peri Archōn).33 Origen inaugurated the Christian tradition of the allegorical reading of the Song of Songs, one that continued in Gregory of Nyssa, Bernard of Clairvaux, and William of Saint-Thierry among others.34 In the preface to On First Principles, Origen elaborates the anthropology and cosmology behind his understanding of interpretive work.35 Like Augustine in the De doctrina christiana, he observes that much contained in scripture is profoundly obscure, and he argues that such obscurity is placed strategically in the text by the divine will in order that the exegete might have material on which to exercise (exercitium) his or her mind.36 The end of such exercise, however, is not simply to avoid the boredom of clarity but the to transform the entire person.37

Origen’s anthropology holds human beings to be composed of body, soul, and spirit, although this tripartite structure is often rendered more simply as a dualism of the “outer” and the “inner” person, the corporeal and the spiritual, each of which has analogous sensory faculties.38 The former has as its object the mortal and corruptible, while the latter perceives that which is incorporeal, immutable, and divine.39 The corporeal veils the spiritual, blurs its contours, obscures its image, even as the scripture is a treasure contained in the earthen vessels of language and the corporeality of the literal meaning.40

Through the askesis of allegorical exegesis, in which the interpreter exercises the mind on the obscurities of the literal level of scripture, the reader begins to lift the veil of the text and, through this textual practice, to transform his or her body, which is homologous with the literal sense of scripture.41 Allegorical reading is the interpretive method that enables the literal to speak otherwise so that the plot and character are revealed to be truly about the soul’s desire for God and God’s love for the soul. Allegory is a key means for the soul to turn toward God and become spiritual, to progress from simple beginner—for whom only the literal level of the text has resonance and meaning—to perfect, the stage at which a reader becomes able to see and understand the hidden meaning of a text. Origen describes this process of anthropological transformation by means of allegorical interpretation in book 4 of On First Principles:

Each one must therefore describe (describere) the meaning (intelligentiam) of the divine writings in a threefold way upon [his or her] own soul (anima); that is, so that the simple (simpliciores) may be edified (aedificentur) by what we may call the body of the scriptures (corpore scripturarum) (for such is the name we may give to the common and literal interpretation); while those who have begun to make a little progress (proficere) … may be edified by the soul (anima) of scripture; and those who are perfect (perfecti) … may be edified by the spiritual law.… Just as [a human being] therefore, is said to consist of body, soul, and spirit, so also does the holy scripture, which has been bestowed by the divine bounty for [humanity’s] salvation.42

The body, soul, and spirit of the exegete and the bodily, soulish, and spiritual meaning of the text are imbricated; any operation on one is an operation on the other.

While the three senses of scripture, the constitution of the human person, and the stages of spiritual progress are homologized in De principiis, the tripartite structure described as the basis for a transformative exegetical itinerary is charted elsewhere by Origen according to the pattern of the trilogy attributed to Solomon: Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Songs. Each book corresponds to the three educative moments of the soul in its ascent to God. As in De principiis, adepts read according to their level of advancement. Proverbs corresponds to the fleshly person who is a “beginner” on the spiritual path and who must read texts that offer an edifying literal reading. Ecclesiastes, in which one discovers the truth of material reality, corresponds to the “psychic” person, one “progressing” on the spiritual path, who is neither fleshly nor spiritual. The Song of Songs is reserved for those who have passed through the paideia—the intellectual and physical training—of the earlier stages, able now to engage in the spiritual enterprise of allegorical interpretation, which delivers the soul to the state of perfection.43 The Song is considered dangerous because it speaks in the language of erotic love in a literal manner and could, if read with coarsened physical eyes rather than with the purified eyes of the “inner” person, lead to lust and a falling away from contemplative union with God.44 If read correctly, however, as an ascetic exercise impelled by allegoresis, the text will enflame the love of the heart for God and further purify the soul, as the epithalamium becomes the love song of the human soul and her divine lover.

Origen’s typology of the spiritual journey had a long afterlife, circulating with particular alacrity among Cistercians.45 Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153) speaks of the ordo caritatis in terms of carnal, rational, and spiritual love.46 Moreover, Bernard was a key witness to the performative notion of meditative reading in the Cistercian tradition. Building on the work of twelfth-century theologians who developed an analogy between scripture and that which is inscribed on the interior of each person (liber conscientiae and liber cordis),47 Bernard writes in his first sermon on the Song of Songs that the Song “is learned only by experience” (sola addiscit experientia).48 The reader of the Song must look in his or her “book of experience” (liber experientiae) in order that a new experience, one constituted in and through the Song, may occur: “Today we read the book of experience (Hodie legimus in libro experientiae). Let us turn to ourselves and let each of us search his own conscience about what is said. I want to investigate whether it has been given to any of you to say, ‘Let him kiss me with the kiss of his mouth.’”49

Turning first to his own “book of experience,” the monk discerns where he stands in comparison to the ideal lover of God, the bride. The goal is “to see the gap between one’s own experience of God’s love and one’s own love for God and then to meditate on, chew over, and digest the words of the Song so that one might come more fully to inhabit them.”50 While Guibert of Nogent (d. ca. 1124) wrote that all Christians should be able to read within themselves, as though within a book, the temptations and sin that are described in sermons and scripture,51 Bernard promised another field of experience for the select few who assimilated their desire and practice to that of the bride through an examination of conscience, asceticism, and devout reading of the Song. Such a monk might ultimately become the bride, able to say with a fullness of desire, “Let him kiss me with the kiss of his mouth.”52

It was, however, William of Saint-Thierry (d. 1148), a Benedictine-turned-Cistercian monk and friend of Bernard, who most elaborately adopted Origen’s typology in his two most popular works (which circulated under Bernard’s name), Exposition on the Song of Songs and The Golden Letter, as well as The Enigma of Faith. Thomas makes extensive use of William in the Life of Lutgard, and it is likely that, when he wrote in the preface to Lutgard’s Life that the text would be structured according to the “beginners” (inchoantium), the ones “progressing” (proficientium), and the “perfect” (perfectorum), he derived his use of the Origenistic typology from William. Although it is not possible to determine whether Thomas had access to the entirety of the Exposition, The Golden Letter, and other of William’s writings or knew only portions of them through florilegia, the Life is profoundly influenced by William’s oeuvre.53 I will thus focus on William as Thomas’s source for understanding the performative nature of reading the Song of Songs. I will argue that in adopting William’s typology, Thomas marks the vita from the outset as a text concerned with ways of reading and inhabiting a monastic practice, reading that is performed by and realized in the soul and the body.54

WILLIAM OF SAINT-THIERRY AND THE THREE STATES OF PRAYER

William adapts Origen’s schema in the Exposition to describe the three states of those who pray (orantium). The states (status) refer to the kind of person praying as well as to the kind of prayer offered. He names these the animal, rational, and spiritual (animalem, rationalem, spiritualem).55 While this terminology differs from Thomas’s, his terms basically accord with those found in The Golden Letter, where William writes of beginners (incipientium), those making progress (proficientium), and the perfect (perfectorum). The vocabulary of The Golden Letter aligns with that of the Exposition, however, when he writes that the state of beginners may be called “animal” (animalis), the state of those who are making progress “rational” (rationalis), and the state of the perfect “spiritual” (spiritualis).56

The Exposition opens with a basic anthropological principle, namely that the human person was created ad imaginem et similitudinem.57 According to William, to be in the image of something is to participate in it, to have reality by virtue of that relation. Participation in the image is the birthright of all humans, and it is that original sharing in the divine nature that makes possible the human search for God. The likeness is the perfecting activity of divinity in the daily practices of life. While both image and likeness have been damaged by sin, likeness suffers the more serious injury.58

The three stages of life refer to the progression of the soul in its quest to purify the image and likeness in order to reach the “fruition” (fruendum) of God in the face-to-face vision after death. This vision is inextricably wed to the state of the soul, for “as the one who prays is, so the God to whom he prays appears to him.”59 A reciprocity exists between the similitude and its vision, for “no one who contemplates you reaches fruition of you save insofar as he becomes like to you” (nemo usque ad fruendum contemplatur, nisi in quantum similis tibi efficitur).60

The prayer of the animal state is more complex than it initially appears. At first, William attributes the category to those who ask something of God apart from God’s own self.61 Such prayer, he argues, “finds no acceptance in the song of love,” for the bride singularly desires the presence of the groom. Such animal persons must clothe God in a human form (secundum formam humanam) and, William writes, “the God to whom he prays is ever in the dark cloud.”62 Yet William also asserts that the animal soul, if “religious” (meaning that he or she prays to the human Jesus with much devotion), though dominated by bodily concerns and conceiving of God in corporeal terms, can arrive through these “bodily imaginings (imaginationibus corporesi) … without knowing how, at understanding certain mysteries of piety (concipiens sacramenta pietatis).… For [that one] loves (diliget) much, and therefore much is granted.”63 Saints, too, may perform a kind of animal prayer when asking for help for this world, but their petitions are offered with true piety.64

William derives the biblical warrant for the rational state by referencing the Ascension of Jesus, who departed from the view of his disciples so that the Holy Spirit would descend on them.65 Likewise, the rational seeker must dispel all images and seek God “beneath the mask of many faces” (ex multarum personis facierum), for “as long as [the one] who prays thinks of anything bodily in him to whom [that one] prays, the prayer is indeed devout, but not entirely spiritual.”66 Here, the goodwill of the animal stage, which desires God without comprehension, sees with understanding (intellectum) and finds fruition in love (amorem).67

The third and final stage, the spiritual state, is the most elusive. The prayer of the perfect—the face-to-face vision of God—is impossible while in the body:

Now [one] cannot see (videre) God’s face and live (Ex. 33:20), cannot, that is, attain in this life full knowledge of him (plenam ejus cognitionem in hac vita apprehendere). God, then, in his divine greatness, places in the understanding of his lover (in sensu amantis) and entrusts to him a certain quasi-knowledge (effigiem) of himself—consisting not in an imaginary phantasm (praesumpti phantasmatis), but in a certain devout affection (piae affectionis), which a [person] yet living in the flesh is able to grasp and endure (sustinere).68

While this affection given by grace (in contrast to a corporeal image of the divinity) is not the fruition of the beatific vision, it is the mark of the spiritual state on earth, a state toward which the rational person always tends. A person is rational insofar as he or she is guided to his or her goal “by reason” and spiritual according the measure of the attainment of that goal.69 This attainment, however, is not absolute. As arrival must wait for death, the rational and spiritual stages engage in a continual oscillation:

While this [one] is being purified, he or she is rational; but when purified, is spiritual. But as the rational state (statum) should always progress (proficere) toward the spiritual, so the spiritual state must sometimes revert to the rational. That a spiritual person should always act spiritually is something never to be attained in this life; nevertheless the person (homo) of God should always be either rational in what he or she seeks or spiritual in what he or she loves.70

Furthermore, even the carnal images of the animal state may, if directed correctly, obtain in the rational state;71 the rational soul may still use and encounter God through the use of images.

While these states are in some sense discrete, progressing according to the logic of increasing perfection, we see that the lines between them are imperfectly drawn. Even the saints, who attain the spiritual state intermittently in this life, partake of all three types of prayer at any given time. Those who seek wisdom move continuously among these stages, with arrival at the spiritual state deferred until death. Thus, while the word status suggests “static” (derived from the Latin stare “to stand,” referring to physical attitude, social standing, as well as the “characteristic mark” of a thing), the middle term, proficientes—those progressing from the beginner toward the spiritual state—implies continual movement, one that travels between the poles of the spiritual itinerary.

The drama of the bride and bridegroom within the Song, consisting of the fluctuations of presence and absence between the lover and beloved, the bride’s abandonment and subsequent search for the groom, offers the best way to understand the temporal relation between the three states in the context of the Exposition. The plot’s various suspensions, twists, and reversals subvert any notion of either static development or inexorable temporal progress, even as a conception of progress as increasing perfection—a perfecting that occurs as the rational soul completes the lessons and purifications of the animal stage, enabling it to become spiritual—is posited by the typology.

The oscillation in the Song is the meaning of the “wound” of charity, a love that renders the absence of the lover visible and painful. J. M. Déchanet notes that William distinguishes four acts in the song: incitement to love, purgation, repose, and the epithalamium, each of which “revert[s] to an identical scenario, but in a higher key than before.”72 The progress thus proceeds as a spiral rather than a straight line as each consummation reverts to distance, inciting the desiring soul to seek the next moment of union. In each song (although William only completed commentaries on two), the bride and groom enjoy a mutual repose followed by the groom’s abandonment of the bride and her subsequent search for him, a search that William understands to be a process of purgation.73 Thus, in the first Song, he writes that the bride was brought into the groom’s storerooms after her initial conversion from the animal to the rational stage and there learned many things about him and herself, receiving gifts of perfume as well as his favor, all of which acted as an “incitement to love” (irritamen amoris).74 Following this wooing, however, he “went forth and withdrew” in order that “she might be trained (exercendum) and purified (purgandam) but not utterly abandoned (deserendam) … and thereupon she was wounded by charity, enkindled with desire of him who was absent (desiderio absentis aestuans) drawn by the charm of a holy newness (sanctae novitatis suavitate affecta).… She is cast aside and left to herself” (destituta ac derelicta).75 In this first contact, the bride was given an intimation of fruition with a kiss at her conversion but did not yet recline in the mutual repose that will occur when the bride acts in cooperation with her divine lover following her purgation.76

In the second Song, William figures distance both as the separation from heaven demanded by the mortal life and as the impossibility of sustaining contemplation while in the body. The bride is sent from “contemplation (contemplatione) of the bridegroom’s riches to the house of her poverty,” the flesh.77 While the starting point of the second Song is the bride’s return from a state of ecstasy, it thus begins, as Déchanet notes, in a higher key than the initial incitements to love in the first Song, both Songs share the same structure, a movement of “desire becom[ing] a crucifixion” (cruciante desiderio) and the temporary relief from grief through union.78

Thus, it would seem that the three stages of prayer correspond to William’s understanding of the plot of purification, one that proceeds through advance, retreat, and repetition, while interludes of repose or union punctuate the pain occasioned by this deferral. The very agony of these postponements and the momentary suspensions of this pain map the plot of the Song; it is the shape of desire and the means of purification. This plot belongs not only to the bride and bridegroom of the text but also to the reader of the Song. In performing the askesis of allegory, the exegete’s own soul becomes the bride, undergoing the same incitement, crucifixion, and purgation of desire: the exegete’s carnal love is redirected toward its heavenly bridegroom.

William introduces the Exposition with an account of allegorical reading in the Origenist tradition. The ideal reader is a performer, one who inhabits the role of the bride by taking up her script so completely that the text is given a second life as the reader-performer enters conversation with the divine lover.79 He writes, “We beseech you, O Holy Spirit, that we may be filled, O Love, with your love, in order to understand (ad intelligendum) the canticle of love. Thus may we also become in some measure participants (efficiamur participes) in the holy conversation of Bridegroom and Bride, that what we read may take effect in us (ut agatur in nobis quod legitur a nobis).”80

Others have noted this passage to be an exceptionally strong statement of the performative knowledge granted by a particular kind of devotional reading. Ineke van ’t Spijker translates agatur in nobis as “may be performed in us.” The reader, she argues, becomes the “scene of the drama,” compelled by reading to turn inward, and “when he finds these stages [the threefold division of the spiritual life] recognize them in himself.” Van ’t Spijker’s notion of the performance of the bride and groom occurring within the exegete is drawn from her further argument that William’s use of intelligendum here could be based on the classical etymology of intellectus, which is intus legere, or as William glosses it in his work, Speculum Fidei, “when [the believer] reads in the affect of his or her heart what he or she believes.”81 The text here is a site of self-recognition as well as a drama in which the reader becomes a participant in the story. Taken up in faith and ruminated upon, understanding (intelligendum) arises through a devoted reading that inscribes the text on the heart, such that the reader is eventually able to “read within” the conversation of the bride and bridegroom, their love having become the reader’s own.82

For William, the transformation of affect by divine affection is necessary for understanding the Song, for the canticle teaches love, and “where affections are concerned, only persons possessing like affections can readily understand what is said” (Ubi enim de affectibus agitur, non facile, nisi a similiter affectis, capitur quod dicitur).83 The text escapes understanding if the affect is not fully engaged, if the reader’s dispositions remain unconformed to the text. To know is to be “affected.”84 To be “literate” in this view—though William does not use the term itself—would be the capacity to set the text to work within the reader such that it is understood by being “read within” the experiencing heart. Such a transformation of the person by means of inhabiting textual space, becoming the scene where its drama is enacted, ultimately effects the transformation of the likeness (similitudo) of the soul so that it may undergo its purgative migration and move through the stages of the spiritual life.85 The further the soul turns “in humble love” (humilis amor) toward its source, the more it is “conformed” (conformatur) to that source, a growth in resemblance that ultimately moves toward the unity of spirit (unitas spiritus), which is the mark of a “God-affected person” (homo Deo affectus).86

It is no surprise, then, that William’s account of reading is dominated by the term affectus. The term captures the curious relation between activity and passivity, practice and grace, in the human relationship with God. Affectus—a passive participle—arises from God’s action on the heart (afficio). Human love emerges from divine initiative, which changes the subject, rendering him or her receptive to God even as even as the monk carefully cultivates this very receptivity through spiritual practices, including the reading of scripture.87 The monastic understanding of cultivated passivity complicates the gendering of literacy as male, for literacy, properly speaking, suggests a disposition of openness and humility before the divine voice of the text.

PLOTTING THE VITA LUTGARDIS: THOMAS OF CANTIMPRÉ AND THE MONASTIC MODEL OF READING

Thomas’s foregrounding of the typology of the threefold ascent of the soul in the prologue of the Life situates the vita in the monastic lineage beginning with Origen. It is a subtle means of introducing Lutgard not only as the bride of the Song but also as the exegete who seeks to have the text “performed” within her. The emplotment of the vita is thus a key means for Thomas’s narrative assimilation of Lutgard’s life to that of the Song of Songs and of her desire for God to that of the bride.

Yet the Life contains a multiplicity of plot structures. The first is that posited by the prologue and repeated in 2.43, of the threefold ascent of the soul as it moves from the animal to the rational to the spiritual stage, a model that Thomas suggests will determine the content of each of the vita’s three books. A second plot is the temporally determined progression of childhood, adolescence, and old age. A third tracks Lutgard’s movement from early life with her family to a Benedictine monastery, to her transition to the Cistercian monastery at Aywières, and finally to her last years and death. These organizing devices, despite their shared tripartite structure, imperfectly map onto each other, however: Lutgard experiences the union with God that is reserved for the spiritual stage at a precociously early age and before undergoing the purgative process, a union from which she retreats.88 She becomes a Cistercian at age twenty-four, at which time she is both “progressing” and, for her final eleven years, perfect.

Broadly speaking, the three books of the vita are structured according to the progress of the soul outlined by the prologue’s typology. Book 1, chapters 1–7, which contain her childhood, adolescence, conversion, novitiate, and consecration as a Benedictine, concern the animal stage, addressing Lutgard’s life in the “world” (including her love for a young man and her survival of an attempted rape).89 The remaining passages of book 1, following her entrance to the Benedictine order, represent the beginning of her progress and her exultation in her progress (proficiens).90 The later chapters primarily document her visions of the human Jesus and of other saints who offered her comfort and confirmed her calling as well as miracles in which she manifested her holiness to the community (the sun descended on her at night; she is suspended in the air and is miraculously crowned).91 At the end of book 1, Lutgard moves to the Cistercian order.

Book 2, opening as it does with the dramatic verb transeundo (the technical word for the translation of relics in canonization ceremonies), marks a shift to the purgative work of the progressing soul bereft of the bridegroom, who in this loneliness learns the virtues, practices penance, and experiences fear. The language of love, so dominant in book 1, all but disappears. Instead of the visions of light and consolation that mark the first book, her visions are of the dead and the demonic. Lutgard’s purgation is mirrored by her efforts to redeem others as she takes up her role as healer and intercessor for those in purgatory. No fewer than twenty passages involve her intercessory work, pointing to the ambiguity of purgation for her (as for Christina); her purgation is for others as much as or more than they are for herself. She performs two seven-year fasts, one of them initiated after the Virgin came to her distressed by the Albigensians. She undergoes a “martyrdom” in which a blood vessel bursts in her chest, making her a second Agnes.92 A spying priest witnesses her spattered with blood while she ecstatically meditates on the Passion.93 And despite her advanced state, Lutgard is twice a victim of scrupulosity and becomes debilitated by fear for her soul.94

In book 3, Lutgard is stripped of all extraneous comforts and privileges and despises this world, for in it she is unable to sustain the contemplation and union that she desires. Finally, she enters the full fruition of union in death.

We see in the three books the progress of the soul outlined by the typology offered in the preface and its allegorical elaboration as suggested by William. While this description of the vita suggests a fairly linear emplotment governed by William’s typology, closer examination reveals multiple reversals and prolepses within the narrative. For instance, contemplation appears in the purgative stage when she is “rapt in contemplation.”95 In book 2, the ascetic stage, Lutgard weeps penitential tears, and Christ appears in bodily form, when, according to a strict interpretation of the typology, such somatic activities belong in the first book.96 Finally, Lutgard continues her ascetic purgation in the final moments of her life despite her perfection.97 This mixture of stages is not evidence of an anecdotal structure dominating the vita but of the oscillations of the plot of the Song that mark the incitement and crucifixion of desire in commentaries like William’s.

Most strikingly, book 1 portrays moments of the perfection of the bridal union in Lutgard’s early life. As with William’s heroine, Thomas’s Lutgard is said to “perfectly follow Christ the lamb”;98 oil drips from her hands like the bride of the Song of Songs 5:5 while she experiences the spiritual drunkenness of the perfect:

Squeezing [her hands] she said, “Look, sister, how the Almighty deals with me!” … Saying this as if she were drunk—and indeed she was drunk—she danced around the reclusorium with wondrous gestures.… Invited by the bridegroom, she had been “led into the wine-cellar.” Afterward, like one beloved (cara), she ate the bread of penance with toil; then like one more beloved (carior) she drank the abundance of his grace; and finally like one most beloved (carissima) she became drunk and was filled with exceeding and ineffable joy and with a spirit of folly (modum excedens despientium spiritu ineffabiliter laetabatur).99

This passage makes clear that despite experiencing the ecstatic drunkenness of a mystical adept who is “most beloved,” in book 1 Lutgard has not yet arrived at the final contemplative stage; rather, this early encounter contains the seed of its later fruition. In fact, according to William’s logic, Lutgard’s experience of being “most beloved” (carissima)—the third and most perfect degree of love—in the wine cellar of the groom was necessary for the subsequent drama of purgation, impelled as it was by the bride’s removal from that place of ecstasy.

Book 3 foregrounds the oscillation between distance and union by which the purgations of the rational stage occur, as the book is driven primarily by her desire to die: “From her ardent yearning to see Christ, she had developed a fixed idea that she should pass over (transire) to the Lord at that time.”100 The day of her death is the reference point by which all events in the book are timed. The book contains her predictions of her own death,101 visions that both help her prepare for death and visions that tell her death is not yet at hand.102 Thus, her earthly life is narrated against the horizon of death, an event that throws the present into relief as a place of lack and longing.

ILLITERACY IN THE VITA LUTGARDIS

I have argued that Thomas’s emplotment of the Life aligns Lutgard with the figure of the bride. As we have seen, assimilation to the bride in monastic practice typically occurs through the discipline of reading. Thomas, however, makes extensive use of the illiteracy topos in order to represent Lutgard’s sanctity. He deploys the topos, paradoxically, to describe Lutgard in such a way as to render her an ideal Cistercian reader, for it enables him to represent Lutgard as one who cultivates the exemplary humility essential to Cistercian notions of reading; as we saw with William, the soul’s turning toward its source occurs “in humble love” (humilis amor), and that turning is the necessary requirement for its being “conformed” (conformatur) to its source.103

Lutgard calls herself laica monialis four times in the second book. The seventeenth-century editor of her Life, Godfrey Henschen, notes that this epithet does not mean that she was a laywoman or conversa. Instead, the phrase contrasts her educational status with other figures in the vita, such as the magis literata Sybille de Gages.104 The circumstances in which Lutgard describes herself as laica monialis follow a similar pattern: she hears a divine voice quoting scripture, which she, an “unlettered nun,” does not understand until it is “interpreted” by a human interlocutor. This pattern stands in contrast to those visions—whether of saints (Saint Catherine), sinners (Innocent III), or the godhead—which Lutgard understands and reports directly without interpretative assistance.105 It is not, then, the visionary element that baffles Lutgard, but specifically the quotation of scriptural passages: it is to these latter experiences that Thomas refers in his use of the epithet laica.

Two examples in which Thomas employs the illiteracy topos will suffice to demonstrate his larger strategies. First, in 2.33, Lutgard is said to have had a desire to do a good deed for a “poor little woman.” “In her spirit,” she heard Christ say to her, “In the psalm you read and say to me ‘O Lord, my portion, I have said I would keep your law’ (Ps.118:57). This is how you should understand it: I am your portion, you have nothing else. So then, you should respond to the needy woman, Gold and silver I have none, but what I have I give you’ (Acts 3:6). If you pray for her, you will have given her what is yours. You will have kept my law.”

Rather than turn to a human source for interpretation of the scripture, here Lutgard receives its meaning and application from Jesus himself. Lutgard goes to Sybille de Gages, who looks up the gloss for Psalm 118:57 and discovers that “the Lord’s response to Lutgard accorded exactly with the gloss.” Thomas takes this to mean that the scriptures “are expounded by the same Spirit by which they were composed.” In contrast with previous cases, in which Lutgard’s message was delivered to those able to make it intelligible, Lutgard’s vision confirms the accuracy and authority of the gloss even as the gloss confirms her vision.

In this episode, divine interpretation is appended to the vision proper. This is not an instance of divinely infused knowledge occurring in a moment of ecstasy; the vision and its interpretation occur in discrete moments, and Lutgard attains understanding through interpretation. As such, the purpose of these tales is not to foreground Lutgard’s illiteracy but to emphasize the necessity of interpretation. Thomas portrays Lutgard as a visionary whose ecstasies did not separate her from her community and the human work of hermeneutics but pulled her into conversation with other nuns and the interpretations of the gloss. Like Paul, whom Augustine offers as an ideal reader in De doctrina christiana—a humble man whose visionary experience does not preclude a willingness to be instructed by others—Lutgard’s visions opened her to human teaching, showing that she had, in Augustine’s words, “put away false pride and learn[ed] whatever can be learn[ed]” from others.106 Thomas’s representation of Lutgard as laica, then, does not simply relegate her to the realm of “mute flesh” or a charismatically gifted yet intellectually stunted holy woman. In fact, it represents her as an exemplarily humble interpreter of scripture who turns to human sources in order to understand her visionary encounters, rendering her illiteracy a manifestation of her exemplary humility. Thomas thus transvalues the category of literacy, turning it from a sign of clerical privilege into an indicator of humility. Meanwhile, the charismatic knowledge of the visionary, typically ascribed to women in the late-medieval period as a mark of humility and separation from male clerical power, is implicitly portrayed as a risky phenomenon whose potential arrogance is tempered by literacy.

The most forceful instance of Lutgard’s representation as illiterate occurs in 1.12. The passage demonstrates another strategy in Thomas’s depiction of Lutgard as illiterate. In response to her abundant compassion, she receives an ability to heal by means of her saliva or touch. But because this gift leaves her overwhelmed by crowds, she asks that, in exchange for this gift, she might better understand (intelligam) the Psalter, so that she might be more devout (ad majorem devotionem). Lutgard’s request is granted, and she miraculously understands the Psalter “more lucidly” (lucidius intellexit). Yet the divine gift again does not satisfy. Thomas, in a moment that profoundly echoes the teaching of De doctrina christiana concerning obscure signs as discussed in the previous chapter, writes that “she had not yet made as much progress (proficere) in this grace as she had expected—for the reverence of a veiled mystery (reverentia velati mysterii) is the mother of devotion, what is hidden (res celata) is the more avidly sought (avidius quaeritus), and what is concealed is looked upon with more veneration (venerabilius absconsa conspicitur).” Though the gift bestows understanding, the revelation of what was before hidden hinders rather than intensifies her desire by delivering too much clarity. Like William’s bride, whose desire is incited by the absence of the bridegroom, Lutgard requires mystery to impel her devotion. “What use is it to me to know the secrets of Scripture,” Thomas has her exclaim in an explicit invocation of the illiteracy and simplicity topoi, “I, an unlettered, uncultivated, and uneducated nun?” (idiotae et rusticae et laicae moniali).

Lutgard asks that, instead of this knowledge of the Psalter, she might have God’s heart. He gallantly asks for hers, a request to which she agrees if he would, Thomas writes, “temper your heart’s love to my heart and that I may possess my heart in you” (ut cordis tui amorem cordi meo contemperes & in te cor meum possideam). Thomas explains this “communion of hearts” as the “union of an uncreated with a created spirit” (unjo spiritus increati & creati), echoing the Pauline language of 1 Corinthians 6:17: “Who clings to God is made one spirit with him” (Quae adhaeret Deo, unus spiritus efficitur).107 From this union, Lutgard enjoys Christ’s guardianship of her heart, which prevents any fleshly temptation or impure thought from disturbing her mind.

This communion of hearts performs what William describes as the translation of the reader’s experience into the bride’s. Thus, while Lutgard initially desired to understand the Psalms with a devout love—a love that is the mark, according to William, of the good, simple, animal soul—her understanding (intellectum) was not yet of a nature to be “read within” the heart.108 The exchange of hearts—the tempering of Christ’s heart to her own so that they exist as one spirit—translates Christ’s interiority into her.

We should not, then, read Lutgard’s self-description as idiotae et rusticae et laicae moniali as simply a statement of her inability to read. Thomas attributes great understanding to her, an understanding that is, in some sense, too great, for it dissolves the desire incited by the text’s obscurity.109 Her proclamation makes sense only if read through Thomas’s theological matrix. The figure for William’s exegete, who is passing into the spiritual stage, is the “simple soul” who “recognizes that he or she failed in poverty, humility and simplicity before that soul was dignified by this knowledge [of God] and understanding [of enlightened love].” Just as Bernard argues that the reader must turn to the book of experience, William writes that the progressing soul should apply all “faculties, made keener by simplicity,” to the awareness of his or her own failure, “relying less on book learning (litteratura) than on the powers of the Lord and his justice alone.”110 The one who has found knowledge through study must return to simplicity in order for those faculties that are exalted by intellectual success to be strengthened through an experience of dependence on divine power. The simplicity of the beginner recurs, although in a higher key, in the spiritual state.111

LITERACY IN THE VITA LUTGARDIS

While the construction of Lutgard’s sanctity through the illiteracy topos foregrounds her humility and represents the affective nature of her understanding, Thomas also portrays her as a Cistercian student of the Bible and uses the vocabulary of reading derived from that tradition to describe her practice.

In the earliest stages of her conversion, when she was a “simple” girl (simplex), her will still inclining toward a human rather than divine bridegroom, Christ “appeared (apparuit) to her in that human form (in ipsa forma humanitatis)” that he had taken at the incarnation. He showed Lutgard his bleeding side wound and said, “Do not seek any longer the caresses of unseemly love. Here you may perpetually contemplate (contemplare) what you should love.… Here I pledge (spondeo) that you shall attain the delights of total purity.”112 Terms of physical sight dominate the language of the passage. A young man attempted to steal a glimpse of Lutgard by “observing” (observaret) the right time and place to conceal himself outside her house. With the appearance of Christ, the context shifts to the vision of the divine suitor, who is described with the verbs appareo, video, ostendo, and contemplare. In this transition to divine sight, the terms of sensory vision remain intact. Likewise, L. Reypens argues that the term forma, when used to refer to the humanity of Christ, indicates that the vision is physical in nature.113 This physical vision of Christ’s human form is consonant with William’s description of the animal stage in which the simple, devout soul prays to Christ secundum formam humanam.114

The vision of Christ in his humanity then moves into a new register when the language of vision aligns with terms derived from reading:

Alarmed by such an oracle (oraculo), Lutgard therefore immediately held fast (haesit) with the eyes of her heart (oculis cordis) to what she had seen (vidisset). Like a dove meditating (meditans) at a window at the entrance of the sunlight, she keenly observed (observabat) the crystalline opening of the Ark, the typological Body of Christ (arcae typici). At once her fleshly bloom was consumed away and, like every lover, her countenance paled. Inwardly brightened by a supernal brilliance, she sensed (sensit) that what she had lost was the darkness of total vanity.115

The vision of Christ’s human form enters Lutgard’s heart (prefiguring the later exchange of hearts). She holds fast to its memory, “meditating” on it. According to Jean Leclercq, in the monastic context, “one cannot meditate on anything else but a text.”116 Meditation on the page is a fixing of the words in the memory. Rather than a proper text, however, Lutgard meditates on her vision of Christ’s body, extending the referential scope of Leclercq’s textuality. If one can meditate only on texts in a monastic context, then vision here becomes text. What Lutgard saw in this meditation, however, was not the bleeding side wound described in 1.2 but the “typological body of Christ,” Noah’s Ark.117 Thomas transposes Lutgard’s visionary experience into the terms of the textual practice of reading of Old Testament typologically and thus emphasizes the textuality of Lutgard’s vision, tying her act of meditation even more intimately to that of lectio. In the meditation on her vision of Christ’s human form, she “observed” his body as a crystalline opening to the ark; it is as if she turned a page and found a new passage that was the shadow and copy of the first.118 By comparing her with a dove, Thomas further suggests that Lutgard’s allegorical practice here begins transforming her into the bride, for like the bride and dove of Song 5:2, in her meditation she “slept but [her] heart was awake.”

The assimilation of Lutgard’s visionary experience to the language of reading continues in 1.13. Having been roused from a fever and impelled by an auditory vision to go to church for Matins, she met Christ at the entrance to the church, where he was nailed to the cross. In an intensification of Lutgard’s earlier vision of his wound, he

embraced her who was standing opposite and pressed her mouth against the wound in his right side. There she drank in so much sweetness (dulcedinis hausit) that, from that time forward she was always stronger (robustior) and quicker in the service of God. Those to whom she revealed (revelante) this event have reported (referebant) and certified (probaverunt) that then and for a long time afterwards the saliva in her mouth tasted mellower than the sweetest honey. What is there to wonder in this? “Your lips, my bride, are a dripping honeycomb (Sg. 4:11).” Thus did her heart inwardly ruminate (cor interius ruminabat) on the honey of Christ’s divinity and the milk of his humanity even when her tongue was silent.119

On first sight, this passage seems to manifest the literalization of female piety described by Barratt, one that reduces speech and interiority to the flesh. Vision replaces language and operates in a realm free from textuality, even as the constitution of Lutgard’s own body changes. However, Thomas describes this bodily experience as her “inward rumination.”

Jean Leclercq notes that lectio divina and meditation are often described with the vivid verb ruminatio, which refers to the extended digestion of some animals. Rumination is the work of scriptural memorization. It “inscribes, so to speak, the sacred text in the body and in the soul.” Memorization proceeds through the “mastication” of divine words, speaking the page repeatedly until its nutritive value is fully extracted and assimilated by the reader.”120 While Barratt understands ruminatio to indicate the reduction of speech to bodiliness, it is a vital verb in monastic reading culture, one that indicates not the reduction of speech to bodiliness but a process of spiritual formation by disciplining the body and language in and through each other. Lutgard ruminates on the “text” of Christ’s body and the Christological doctrine of the two natures of Christ. Her rumination—an inward performance, in William’s terms—is so successful that she becomes the bride of Song 4:11, whose “lips are a dripping honeycomb,” tasting the text until her own mouth tasted sweet to others. Her actions offer commentary on the biblical text as well as replication of it.

This assimilation to the bride recurs in 1.16 when, after contemplative prayer, Lutgard’s hands drip with oil. She “showed” (ostendabat) them to her friend “as if she were drunk,” saying, “I am so filled up inwardly by his superabundant grace that now my fingers are outwardly dripping a kind of oil as a manifestation of grace” (repleor interius … exterius ad signifcandum gratiam). Lutgard interprets her dripping hands not only as a sacrament—an outward sign of an inward grace—but in reference to the bride in Song 5:5, who says, “My hands dripped with myrrh, and my fingers were full of the choicest myrrh.” Once again, the exterior, physical event is intimately tied to interior contemplation. The bodily miracle finds authority and warrant in the biblical text, even as Lutgard’s body becomes text, recapitulating the Song. Her allegorization of the text transmutes the letter into spirit (the carnal bride into the bride of Christ)—she becomes an allegorical signa—but the spirit of the text again becomes “letter” as it lives in the particular lineaments of her flesh.

In associating verbs of reading and meditation with Lutgard’s visionary experience, Thomas may seem to rely on Gregory the Great’s famous dictum that images are appropriate for the laity who do not understand the written word. Thus, these passages could be understood as a reiteration of Lutgard’s illiteracy. Thomas’s portrayal of Lutgard meditating on Christ’s body as text—in which lectio divina becomes, in effect, lectio domini—is a precocious example of a phenomenon that is emphasized in later vernacular treatises written for the laity, who had neither the time nor the skills for the ruminative practices of monks and nuns.121 However, meditation on the body of Christ, particularly in the Passion, was not only the provenance of the illiterate; it was also elaborated by twelfth-century Cistercians as part of the very development of the notion of the book of experience and transformation through reading.122 By transferring Lutgard’s reading practice from texts properly speaking to visions of Christ, Thomas attempts to render visible and embodied what Cistercians like William articulate in theological commentary. The vita represents Lutgard as a woman who not only receives inexplicable visions but also ruminates on and allegorizes those visions. These actions transform her into the bride.

The view that Thomas’s representation of Lutgard as an illiterate who has “trouble with language” relegates her to the confines of her body, and its intractable femininity fails to account for the complexity of Thomas’s representation of Lutgard’s literacy or the Cistercian context of the vita. For Cistercian authors like William, exegetical acts ideally give rise to a performance of the text that is both bodily and affective, thereby recapitulating and fulfilling the scriptural text by making it present in history. As William writes, the allegorist “follow[s] … through these metaphors of divine love” until the “outward dramatic allegory becomes in it a true story.”123 The stages through which the bridal soul passes are not confined to the page, operating as two dimensions to be observed by readers. Rather, textual exegesis and meditation are operations performed on the reader, rendering the textual model on the reader’s own soul and body. The bride’s desire becomes the reader’s desire. As a living allegory of the Song, Lutgard models the knowledge of a reader who understands by “reading within.” Assimilated to the bride, she is the scriptural text, brought to life and retextualized by Thomas in order to become available to his audience for their adoption; Thomas stages the vita not only as a commentary on the Song in the lineage of William’s Exposition but as a kind of scripture, and he implies that proper reading of the hagiography will allow access to the body of the saint.

The text thus suggests that Lutgard is not only a figure of the bride but also the reader of her own vita. In other words, the Cistercian mode of reading that is represented in the vita is crucial for the successful realization of Lutgard’s exemplarity, for by representing Lutgard appropriating biblical exemplars with her soul and body, Thomas implicitly suggests how Lutgard’s exemplary life becomes available to his readers through their reading. Even as William built the edifice of his exegesis on the biblical bride, so Thomas read and wrote Lutgard as the bride in order that he might “set love free” in his own readers.124

In addition to Lutgard—who becomes a participant in the biblical drama—and the reader of her vita who participates in Lutgard’s life, there is a third site of incorporation in the text, namely that of Thomas, who mediates between Lutgard and the reader by writing the vita. As the scene portrayed at the beginning of this chapter shows, Thomas’s intense desire for Lutgard’s finger, his need to possess a trace of her bodily presence to hold after her death, impels the writing of the text. In trading the book for her finger, the vita suggests an interchangeability between text and saintly body; Thomas’s book becomes the relic that Abbess Hadewijch desires and over which readers linger, searching for the dead woman’s presence even as his writing of the vita obtains for him the “sacred memorial” of her finger. Text becomes body, body text, in both Lutgard’s practice and Thomas’s hagiography.

Although Thomas’s portrayal of Lutgard’s embodied reading clearly resonates with somatizing constructions of women that proliferate in thirteenth-century hagiography, his construction conforms more closely to Cistercian conceptions of the ideal reader, conceptions that Thomas invokes throughout the Life. What has been understood as Lutgard’s “trouble with language” is, in fact, the realization of Cistercian ideals in which language and literacy are manifest in the saint who is assimilated, bodily and affectively, to the Song.