NOTES

INTRODUCTION

    1.    For the chronology of Thomas’s life, unless otherwise cited, I am drawing on Robert Sweetman, “Dominican Preaching in the Low Countries 1240–1260: Materiae Praedicabiles in the Liber de natura rerum and Bonum universal de apibus of Thomas of Cantimpré” (PhD diss., University of Toronto, 1988). Sweetman reconstructs many of the dates from autobiographical notes in Thomas’s works and also depends on Alfred Deboutte, “Thomas van Cantimpré; Zijn opleiding te Kamerijk,” Ons Geestlijke Erf 56 (1982): 283–89, for an account of Thomas’s education at Cambrai (rather than Liège, as posited by Henri Platelle and R. Godding); Deboutte, “Thomas van Cantimpré als auditor van Albertus Magnus,” Ons Geestlijke Erf 58 (1984): 192–209. Sweetman argues that Thomas should be placed in Cologne at this time, as he mentions in the Bonum universale de apibus that he was a student of Albert the Great when Albert was regent master of theology. While it has been suggested that Thomas sat under Albert between 1232 and 1237 in either Paris or the Cologne Priory, Sweetman argues that the title Thomas used for Albert suggests the years were from 1248 to 1252, when Albert was the regent master at the new studium generale in Cologne (Sweetman, 14). On Thomas Aquinas’s timeline, see Jean-Pierre Torrell, Saint Thomas Aquinas, vol. 1, The Person and His Work, trans. Robert Royal (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press: 1996), 24–27; James A. Weisheipl, Friar Thomas d’Aquino: His Life, Thought, and Work (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1974).

    2.    On Thomas’s appointment as preacher general in Teutonia, with the implication that he traveled extensively during this period, see Thomas Grzebien, “Penance, Purgatory, Mysticism, and Miracles: The Life, Hagiography, and Spirituality of Thomas of Cantimpré” (PhD Diss., University of Notre Dame, 1989), 98.

    3.    Thomas Aquinas, Holy Teaching: Introducing the “Summa Theologiae” of St. Thomas Aquinas, trans. Frederick Christian Bauerschmidt (Ada, MI: Brazos, 2005), 1.1.2, pp. 34–35. See also Marie-Dominique Chenu, La Théologie comme science au XIIIe siècle, 3rd ed. (Paris: Librairie philosophique J. Vrin, 1957); Ulrich Köpf, Die Anfänge der theologischen Wissenschaftstheorie im 13. Jahrhundert (Tubingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1974).

    4.    Charles Lohr, “Aristotelian ‘Scientia’ and the Medieval ‘Artes,’ ” in The European Image of God and Man: A Contribution to the Debate on Human Rights, ed. Hans-Christian Günther and Andrea Aldo Robiglio (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 259. Lohr notes that Thomas Aquinas took up Averroës’s formula, “Science means the certitude of knowledge which is gained by demonstration,” almost verbatim (260).

    5.    Lohr, 259. However, the first principles of sacra doctrina are the revealed articles of faith; they are not “self-evident,” as Thomas addresses in the Summa Theologiae 1.1.2. He argues that the first principles of sacred teaching are, like the mathematical principles that undergird musical practice, a form of “higher scientia,” for they are not known by the practitioner but make their discipline possible. The premises of theology are the higher divine scientia revealed in scripture. Theology is thus a human activity that takes the point of view not of human beings but of God, and its premises are accepted in faith. Theological arguments founded upon such premises remain rooted in faith, and thus they cannot create the same kind of cognitive assent enjoyed by philosophy. The harmonization of theology and philosophy that Thomas Aquinas sought is not, then, their collapse. Jean-Yves Lacoste argues that the creation of the university and the introduction of the faculties of theology and philosophy in the wake of the rediscovery of Aristotle created the need for Thomas Aquinas’s harmonization project, for it separated the disciplines discursively and institutionally, housing them under different roofs with their own faculties. Although this structure aimed at complementarity, Lacoste argues that complementarity was, in fact, an impossible aspiration, and conflict was created through the “precarious division” of sacred and profane subjects, echoed in a variety of “conceptual couples” that come to dominate theological discourse, including natural/supernatural, nature/grace, matter/form. Jean-Yves Lacoste, From Theology to Theological Thinking, trans. W. Chris Hackett (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2014), 45.

    6.    See Frederick Christian Bauerschmidt’s observation in the notes to his abridged translation of the Summa Theologiae in Aquinas, Holy Teaching, 34n13.

    7.    John W. O’Malley, Four Cultures of the West (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2004), 101. This characterization of Scholastic theology that goes under the name of Thomas Aquinas is problematic insofar as it becomes a caricature and leaves aside the elements of devotion and the ethically and spiritually transformative aims of such a pedagogical program, even as it is problematic to characterize hagiography as naïve storytelling without real theological content. This chapter will deconstruct both of these caricatures below.

    8.    Thomas might be considered in some ways an ethnographer. Certainly, his hagiographical projects resonate with many of the strategies and approaches of those who study “lived religion.”

    9.    O’Malley, Four Cultures, 102.

  10.    Thomas of Cantimpré, Vita Mariae Oigniacensis, Supplementum, ed. Arnold Raysse, Acta Sanctorum V (June 23): 572–81. Henceforth VMO-S in the notes. English translation, Thomas of Cantimpré, The Supplement to the Life of Mary of Oignies, trans. Hugh Feiss, in Anneke Mulder-Bakker, ed., Mary of Oignies: Mother of Salvation (Turnhout: Brepols, 2006), 129–66.

  11.    Thomas of Cantimpré, Vita Margarete de Ypres, in “Les Frères Prêcheurs et le mouvement dévot en Flandreaux aux XIIIe siècle,” ed. Gilles Meersseman, Archivum Fratrum Praedicatorum 18 (1948): 106–30. Henceforth VMY in the notes. Other than Thomas of Cantimpré, The Supplement to the Life of Marie d’Oignies, all the vitae have been translated into English by Barbara Newman and Margot H. King in Thomas of Cantimpré: The Collected Saints’ Lives (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008).

  12.    Thomas of Cantimpré, Vita Lutgardis Aquiriensis, ed. Godfrey Henschen, Acta Sanctorum III (June 16): 187–209. Henceforth VLA in the notes.

  13.    Thomas of Cantimpré, Vita Christina mirabilis, ed. Joannes Pinius, Acta Sanctorum V (July 24): 637–60. Henceforth VCM in the notes.

  14.    Thomas of Cantimpré, Vita Ioannis Cantimpratensis, “Une oeuvre inédite de Thomas de Cantimpre: la ‘Vita Ioannis Cantimpratensis,’ ” ed. Robert Godding, in Revue d’histoire Ecclesiastique 76 (1981): 241–316. Henceforth VJC in the notes.

  15.    Thomas of Cantimpré, Bonum universale des apibus, ed. Georges Colvener. (Duaci: Balatazaris Belleri, 1627); partial French translation, Thomas of Cantimpré, Les Exemples du “Livre des abeilles”: Une Vision Medievale, trans. Henri Platelle (Turnhout: Brepols, 1997). Henceforth BUA in the notes.

  16.    Thomas of Cantimpré, Liber de natura rerum von Thomas Cantimpratensis, ed. Helmut Boese (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1973). Henceforth DNR in the notes.

  17.    Barbara Newman, God and the Goddesses: Vision, Poetry and Belief in the Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 294.

  18.    Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault, ed. Arnold Davidson, trans. Michael Chase (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 1995); Lacoste, From Theology.

  19.    Lacoste gives a helpful caution, though, about collapsing the biography and virtue of a thinker with his or her work (23–28).

  20.    The embodied and contextualized origin of these narratives is further apparent when one considers their audience. As a preacher composing texts in order to provide material to celebrate and remember certain figures as holy and to build up the piety of readers and hearers—lay, monastic, and clerical—living in the midst of the complexities of thirteenth-century ecclesiastical, theological, and social transformations, the projected audiences compose, in Hans-Robert Jauss’s words, a “horizon of expectation,” which frames the author’s composition and thus is crucial to the construction of these works. As Cynthia Hahn notes, elaborating on Jauss’s argument, “As recipients of truth claims and rhetorical embellishments, as spiritual doppelgangers to listeners and viewers displayed within the text, as the object of the work’s intent to move (or even to effect conversion), the audience shapes the form and justifies the existence of saints’ Lives. Readers and viewers are always implicitly present in the narrative structure of hagiography even if they are rarely explicitly mentioned in the texts themselves.” Hans Robert Jauss, “Levels of Identification of Hero and Audience,” New Literary History 5 (1973–74): 283–317; Cynthia Hahn, Portrayed on the Heart: Narrative Effect in Pictorial Lives of Saints from the Tenth Through the Thirteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 30. As will become apparent in the chapters, the audience is, in fact, often explicitly present in Thomas’s texts, as figures of the reception of the saints who stand in for reader’s reactions.

  21.    Gregory of Tours, “Liber Vitae Patrum,” in Gregorii Episcopi Turonensis Miracula et Opera Minora, ed. Bruno Krusch and Wilhelm Levison, Monumenta Germaniae Historica: Scriptores Rerum Merovingicarum 1 (Hanover, 1885), part 2, 455.

  22.    Hippolyte Delehaye, The Legends of the Saints, 4th ed., trans. D. Attwater (Portland, OR: Four Courts Press, 1998), 1, says “Hagiography must be of a religious character and aim at edification.” Michel de Certeau accepted this definition in The Writing of History, trans. Tom Conley (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 269–83. Jean Leclercq likewise argued that vitae seek to edify, but he further noted that many types of medieval texts performed this function, including chronicles, thus troubling the definition of hagiography as a “genre” whose essence lies in its capacity to edify. Jean Leclercq, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God: A Study of Monastic Culture, trans. Catherine Misrahi (New York: Fordham University Press, 1961), 166. On the problem of defining hagiography as a genre, see Felice Lifshitz, “Beyond Positivism and Genre: ‘Hagiographical’ Texts as Historical Narrative,” Viator 25 (1994): 95–113.

  23.    Similarly, Patrick Geary argues that it is highly problematic to read hagiography solely in terms of the aim of soliciting the imitation of exemplary figures by readers. Imitation and authorship are, he contends, “abstractions” that treat texts as timeless objects, removing them from the networks of dissemination and use in which readership was embedded. Patrick Geary, Living with the Dead in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), 21.

  24.    Delehaye, Legends, 28–29.

  25.    Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Medieval Identity Machines (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), xviii.

  26.    Newman, God and the Goddesses, 298. Newman demonstrates that interpreting imaginative theology requires using the tools of literary analysis (including analyses of plot, narrative structure, rhythm, repetition, allusion, rhyme, and allegorical interpretation), for these are the techniques by which such theologians construct their texts. She treats works by authors who are typically studied within literature departments (for example, Christine de Pizan and Dante) as theological texts and analyzes the theological content of certain figures by attending to the literary dimensions of their work (for example, Hildegard of Bingen and Julian of Norwich).

  27.    Hahn, Portrayed, 3. This book is not concerned with questions regarding the relationship between word and image qua pictorial representation. On that subject, see Hahn, chap. 2. For a helpful summary of the debates concerning the relationship between theological content and religious images, see Jeffrey Hamburger’s introduction to J. Hamburger and Anne-Marie Bouché, eds., The Mind’s Eye: Art and Theological Argument in the Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006).

  28.    The Dialogues of St. Gregory the Great, trans. P. W. (London: Philip Lee Warner, 1911), book 1, prologue (slightly modified).

  29.    “Illos [learned people] plerumque ratiocinationis argumenta, istos [the ignorant] nonnumquam melius exempla convertunt. Illis nimirum prodest, ut in suis allegationibus victi jaceant; istis vero aliquando sufficit laudabilia aliorum facta cognoscant … quatenus et illos victrix ratio frangeret, et istos ad majora condescendere imitatio blanda suaderet.” Cura Pastoralis 3.7, Patrologia Latina 57b–c, quoted in Robert Sweetman, “Visions of Purgatory and their Role in the Bonum Universale de Apibus of Thomas of Cantimpré,” Ons Geestelijk Erf 67 (1993): 26n21.

  30.    M. M. Mulchahey, “First the Bow Is Bent in Study Study …”: Dominican Education Before 1350 (Toronto: PIMS, 1998), 461. “Quoniam plus exempla quam verba movent secundum Gregorium et facilius intellectu capiuntur et alicuius memoria infiguntur.”

  31.    Simone Roisin, L’hagiographie Cistercienne dans le diocèse de Liège au XIIIe siècle (Louvain: Bibliothèque de l’Université, 1947), 140, 212.

  32.    From the epigraph to David Jones, Epoch and Artist (London: Faber and Faber, 1959).

  33.    Steven Justice, “Did the Middle Ages Believe in Their Miracles?,” Representations 103 (Summer 2008): 1.

  34.    On the prevalence of such exoticization through an appeal to medieval alterity, see Paul Freedman and Gabrielle Spiegel, “Medievalisms Old and New: The Rediscovery of Alterity in North American Medieval Studies,” American Historical Review 103, no. 3 (June 1998): 677–704.

  35.    Justice, “Did the Middle Ages,” 4.

  36.    Justice, 5.

  37.    Justice, 15.

  38.    Dyan Elliott, Proving Woman: Female Spirituality and Inquisitional Culture in the Later Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004). See chapter 1 for discussion of this work.

  39.    Michel de Certeau, The Mystic Fable, vol. 1, The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, trans. Michael B. Smith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 81.

  40.    De Certeau, The Mystic Fable, 86.

  41.    De Certeau, 86. De Certeau focuses on the Eucharistic body as the site where key elements in this “sacramental pastoral” project were combined, including the display of clerical power (the means by which the elements are consecrated) and the late-medieval liturgical innovation of elevation in which the elements are displayed to the people, showing in the act of institution “what the institution was meant to become” (86). Echoing the findings of Henri de Lubac in his study of the changing understanding of the Eucharist and the church in the Middle Ages, de Certeau argues that the possibility of the sacrament functioning in such an objective way arose in the mid-twelfth century when, in a reversal from late-Antique and early-medieval formulations, the Eucharist came to be understood as the corpus verum and the church the corpus mysticum: “The ‘mystery,’ the sacramental body, [was] recast in the philosophical formality of the sign, that is, as one ‘thing,’ which is visible, designating another, which is invisible. The visibility of that object replace[d] the communal celebration, which is a community operation” (84). See Henri de Lubac, Corpus Mysticum: The Eucharist and the Church in the Middle Ages, trans. Gemma Simmonds et al., ed. Laurence Paul Hemming and Susan Frank Parsons (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007).

  42.    De Lubac, 231.

  43.    See, for example, chapter 1 of the Proslogion, a work of apology that could almost be mistaken for Augustine’s Confessions. After opening with a call to contemplate God, the text remains in a mode of address to God, offering prayers both of praise and of petition that understanding will be granted. Anselm of Canterbury, Proslogion, in The Major Works, ed. Brian Davies and G. R. Evans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 82–104.

  44.    Although de Lubac argues that Anselm’s theology retains Augustinian features, his statement—that with Anselm we find new “emphases” in theology—seems to give way to a stronger reading of Anselm as a Scholastic whose apologetic is performed solely through demonstration.

  45.    De Lubac writes, “Thus the mystery to be understood gave way before the miracle to be believed, because the very idea of what ‘understand’ means had changed. Faith does not open up a path to contemplative understanding: it is an obstacle, set up by God himself, to cut across the appetite for rational speculation. There was therefore no longer any question of raising oneself from faith to understanding: from an understanding that had become dialectic, it was clear that on the contrary, we should say: understanding transcends faith. If, despite everything, there was still some talk of ‘understanding,’ only one thing was understood by it: the development of a correct idea of the object to be believed. ‘You see bread, understand flesh.’ ” De Lubac, Corpus Mysticum, 240.

  46.    Such approaches are included under the rubrics of monastic and Scholastic theologies respectively by Leclercq in The Love of Learning.

  47.    In other words, the Summa Theologiae is, among other things, a work of pastoral theology. See Mark D. Jordan, Teaching Bodies: Moral Formation in the Summa of Thomas Aquinas (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016), chap. 2.

  48.    Bernard McGinn, The Flowering of Mysticism: Men and Women in the New Mysticism (1200–1350), The Presence of God: A History of Western Christian Mysticism 3 (New York: Crossroad, 1998), 19.

  49.    O’Malley, Four Cultures, 106.

  50.    O’Malley, 104.

  51.    O’Malley, 105–6. Similar complaints about the devotionally impoverished nature of theology can be seen in the modern period in de Lubac’s critique of neo-Scholasticism that he and other members of the nouvelle théologie undertook in the early twentieth century. In Corpus Mysticum, he calls readers to “relearn from our Fathers, those of Christian antiquity and also those of the Middle Ages” (260).

  52.    De Certeau, The Mystic Fable, 104.

  53.    De Certeau, 104. This is also Lacoste’s argument in From Theology in the context of the relationship between philosophy and theology. Mysticism is de Certeau’s exemplary case of such specialization. He argues that it was first separated from institutional theology, delineated as a separate area of knowledge (a “science”), and ultimately excised from the body of theology proper. It became understood as a space that cannot be traversed by professional theologians, as the “reason” and intelligibility of theological arguments are no longer viewed as preparation for contemplative encounters with God but as anathema to them. This mystical space is marked as affective, feminine, opposed to what was figured as the masculine rationality of theology (de Certeau, 106). Such a delineation between affective and intellective occurred first, however, not to divide theology proper from its mystical form, but to mark a division between philosophy and theology, human and divine forms of knowing. A distinction between human and divine scientia is articulated in a Summa Theologiae completed after 1245 by the disciples of Alexander of Hales (d. 1245). The text argues that human scientia appeals to intellect (intellectus) while theology (divine science) appeals to the affection or will. Scholastics including Robert Fishacre (d. 1248), Robert Kilwardby (d. 1279), and Giles of Rome (d. 1316) argued that theology is fundamentally affective. See Alistair Minnis, “Affection and Imagination in ‘The Cloud of Unknowing’ and Hilton’s ‘Scale of Perfection,’ ” Traditio 39 (1983): 325. On the various articulations of the relationship between love and knowledge in the medieval Christian mystical tradition, see Bernard McGinn, “Love, Knowledge, and Mystical Union in Western Christianity: Twelfth to Sixteenth Centuries,” Church History 56 (1987): 7–24.

  54.    De Certeau, 106. The force of this fragmentation of theological discourse can be seen in the power of recent scholarly efforts—including Newman’s formulation of imaginative theology—to reclaim certain discourses as properly theological and as part of the theological canon. Thus, Bernard McGinn and Nicholas Watson introduced the notion of vernacular theology in the 1990s. For McGinn, vernacular theology is a third type of medieval theology that was emergent in the thirteenth century. What distinguishes it, in part, is that it includes writing by women and others who were not necessarily professional theologians who needed to obtain their authority through different means than those whose authority is derived ex officio; genres (including visions, lyric poetry, hagiographies, letters) and discourses not proper to Scholastic or monastic theology; and understandings of the mystical itinerary according to Neoplatonic frameworks of exemplarism, emanation, and return. McGinn’s efforts built upon the midcentury work of Jean Leclercq, who outlined the contours of “monastic theology” and detailed the monastic culture that was its source and sustained it, as part of an effort to reconfigure the modern study of medieval theology, which had, until then, acknowledged only one form of theological inquiry as properly theological, namely the academic theology of the schools. For a recent effort to interrogate the split between philosophy and theology, see Lacoste, From Theology to Theological Thinking, a work that in turn owes much to Hadot’s Philosophy as a Way of Life. For McGinn’s arguments concerning vernacular theology, see his “Meister Eckhart and the Beguines in the Context of Vernacular Theology,” in Meister Eckhart and the Beguine Mystics: Hadewijch of Brabant, Mechthild of Magdeburg, and Marguerite Porete, ed. Bernard McGinn (New York: Continuum, 1994), 1–14; McGinn, The Flowering of Mysticism, 19–24. For Nicholas Watson’s account of vernacular theology in late fourteenth-century England, see “Visions of Inclusion: Universal Salvation and Vernacular Theology in Pre-Reformation England,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 27 (1997): 145–87; Watson, “Conceptions of the Word: The Mother Tongue and the Incarnation of God,” in New Medieval Literatures 1 (1997): 85–124. For Leclercq, see The Love of Learning.

  55.    See for example, Newman, God and Goddesses, 295, where she argues that someone like Thomas of Cantimpré aims to teach “mere Christianity.” Bernard McGinn notes that there are many hagiographical examples of vernacular theology and further observes that hagiography is “one of the broadest, most investigated, yet still misunderstood forms of medieval literature.” McGinn, Flowering, 20.

  56.    Caroline Walker Bynum’s classic text, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), which draws predominantly on hagiographical sources for making its argument about medieval women’s religious lives as expressed in their relationship to food and embodiment more broadly, treats the theological content of hagiographical works in a novel way. Instead of understanding women’s ascetic practice through the lens of second-wave feminist critique, which saw in practices of self-mortification only evidence of oppression by patriarchal religion, Bynum contextualizes the bodies and deeds of women depicted in various vitae within the expansive symbol system of Christian theology. Thus, Bynum is able to argue not only that women’s practices of fasting and partaking of the Eucharist were imitations of Christ but that women’s bodies were in fact privileged sites of such imitation, for in their bleeding, birthing, and lactating, women’s bodies were associated with Jesus’s functions of dying and feeding the world in order to bring it to new birth. Bynum’s approach does not, however, attend to the integrity or totality of the vitae to which she appeals and so does not account for the fullness of theological vision that emerges only when texts are read as wholes. The generalities that make her argument exciting also obscure the details, tensions, and contradictions of particular works such that the theological diversity within and between texts is not apparent. Bynum’s work has rightly been profoundly influential, changing the field of medieval studies. For an outline of key appreciations and critiques of her work by figures including David Aers, Kathleen Biddick, Karma Lochrie, Richard Rambuss, and Amy Hollywood, see Amy Hollywood, “Feminist Studies,” in The Blackwell Companion to Christian Spirituality, ed. Arthur Holder (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 366–74.

  57.    Ernest McDonnell argues that, along with the vitae, the BUA should be included in studies of religious women in the Belgian context. McDonnell, The Beguines and Beghards in Medieval Culture: With Special Emphasis on the Belgian Scene (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press 1954; 1969), 3.

1. THOMAS OF CANTIMPRÉ

    1.    Barbara Newman, introduction to Thomas of Cantimpré: The Collected Saints’ Lives, ed. Barbara Newman, trans. Barbara Newman and Margot H. King (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008), 4.

    2.    Jennifer Carpenter, “A New Heaven and a New Earth: The Vitae of the Mulieres Religiosae of Liège” (PhD. diss., University of Toronto, 1997), 135n67.

    3.    Thomas de Cantimpré, Bonum universale de apibus, ed. Georges Colvener (Duaci: Baltazaris Belleri, 1627); partial French translation, Thomas de Cantimpré, Les Exemples du “Livre des abeilles”: Une Vision Médievale, trans. Henri Platelle (Turnhout: Brepols, 1997), 2.53.32, 513–14. Henceforth BUA in the notes.

    4.    Sweetman turns to Alfred Deboutte, “Thomas van Cantimpré. Zijn opleiding te Kamerijk,” Ons Geestlijke erf 56 (1982): 283–89, for an account of Thomas’s education at Cambrai (rather than Liège, as posited by Henri Platelle and R. Godding); Deboutte, “Thomas van Cantimpré als auditor van Albertus Magnus,” Ons Geestlijke erf 58 (1984): 192–209.

    5.    Thomas of Cantimpré, Vita Mariae Oigniacensis, Supplementum, ed. Arnold Raysse, Acta Sanctorum V (June 23): 572–81; English translation, Thomas of Cantimpré, “The Supplement to the Life of Mary of Oignies,” trans. Hugh Feiss, in Mary of Oignies: Mother of Salvation, ed. Anneke Mulder-Bakker (Turnhout: Brepols, 2006), book 4, chap. 27. Henceforth VMO-S in the notes.

    6.    Carpenter, “A New Heaven,” 124. See Ernest McDonnell, The Beguines and Beghards in Medieval Culture: With Special Emphasis on the Belgian Scene (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1954; 1969), part 1, chap. 3, for an account of James’s “education in Belgium” through his engagement with the Beguine movement in general and Mary of Oignies and her circle in particular.

    7.    James was a Regular Canon of Saint Nicholas of Oignies in the diocese of Liège, 1211–1216. He was the bishop of Acre 1216–1227, auxiliary bishop of Liège 1227–1229, and cardinal 1229–1240. See McDonnell, 17–21; Brenda Bolton, “Mulieres Sanctae,” in Women in Medieval Society, ed. Susan Mosher Stuard (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1976), 144.

    8.    McDonnell, 20.

    9.    James observed the formation or affiliation of seven Cistercian convents during his sojourn in the diocese of Liège (likely Aywières, La Ramée, Parc-les-Dames, Salzinnes, Robermont, Val-Notre Dame, and Florival). See McDonnell, 107.

  10.    McDonnell, 20, 313ff.

  11.    Thomas’s account is questioned by Philipp Funk, who argues that it is not historically accurate. See Philipp Funk, Jakob von Vitry, Leben und Werke (Leipzig-Berlin: B. G. Teubner, 1909), 18ff. However, McDonnell argues that Thomas’s version of events is indeed credible if read alongside James’s own account in the Vita Mariae Oigniacensis (McDonnell, 22).

  12.    VMO-S, book 1, chap. 1. On the history of the community at Oignies, see McDonnell, 8–19.

  13.    Jacques de Vitry, Vita Mariae Oigniacensis, ed. Daniel Papebroech, Acta Sanctorum, XXV (June 23): 542–72; English translation, Jacques de Vitry, The Life of Mary of Oignies, trans. Margot H. King, in Mulder-Bakker, Mary of Oignies, 33–128. Henceforth VMO in the notes.

  14.    VMO, prologue, 11. “Quae vidimus et novimus, et ex magna parte per experientiam didicimus.” On this personal and experiential emphasis, see Carpenter, “A New Heaven,” 125–27.

  15.    Jacques de Vitry, Historia Occidentalis, ed. John Frederick Hinnebusch (Fribourg: University Press, 1972); Jacques de Vitry, The Exempla, or, Illustrative Stories from the Sermones vulgares of Jacques de Vitry, ed. and trans. T. F. Crane (1890; Nendeln: Kraus Reprint, 1967); Jacques de Vitry, Die Exempla aus den Sermones feriales et communes, ed. J. Greven (Heidelberg: C. Winter, 1914); Jacques de Vitry, Die Exempla des Jakob von Vitry, in Quellen und Untersuchungen zur lateinischen Philologie des Mittelalters, ed. G. Frenken (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1914), 5:1–153.

  16.    Brenda Bolton, “Vitae Matrum: A Further Aspect of the Frauenfrage,” in Medieval Women: Essays Dedicated and Presented to Prof. Rosalind M. T. Hill, ed. Derek Baker (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1978), 254.

  17.    Thomas of Cantimpré, Vita Ioannis Cantimpratensis, in “Une oeuvre inédite de Thomas de Cantimpré: la ‘Vita Ioannis Cantimpratensis,’ ” ed. Robert Godding, Revue d’histoire Ecclésiastique 76 (1981): 241–316; English translation, Thomas of Cantimpré, The Life of Abbot John of Cantimpré, in Thomas of Cantimpré: The Collected Saints’ Lives, 57–124. Henceforth VJC in the notes.

  18.    VJC, 2.12.

  19.    VJC, 1.14, 1.15.

  20.    VJC, 2.8b.

  21.    VJC, 2.13.

  22.    VJC, 2.8b.

  23.    Thomas of Cantimpré, Liber de natura rerum von Thomas Cantimpratensis, ed. Helmut Boese (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1973). Henceforth DNR in the notes. On the DNR, see Pauline Aiken, “The Animal History of Albertus Magnus and Thomas of Cantimpré,” Speculum 22 (April 1947): 205–25; G. J. J. Walstra, “Thomas de Cantimpré, De naturis rerum, État de la question,” Vivarium 5 (1967): 146–71, 6 (1968): 46–61; Lynn Thorndike, A History of Magic and Experimental Science, vols. 1–8 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1929–58); Helmut Boese, “Zur Textüberlieferung von Thomas von Cantimpratensis Liber de natura rerum,” Archivium Fratrum Praedicatorum 39 (1969): 53–68; Christian Hünemörder, “Antike und middelalterliche Encyclopädien und die Popularisierung naturkundlichen Wissens,” Sudhoffs Archiv 65 (1981): 339–67; Roger French and Andrew Cunningham, Before Science: The Invention of the Friars’ Natural Philosophy (Aldershot, Hants: Scolar, 1996); John Block Friedman, “Albert the Great’s Topoi of Direct Observation and His Debt to Thomas of Cantimpré,” in Pre-Modern Encyclopedic Texts, ed. Peter Binkley, (Leiden: Brill, 1997), 379–92; Abeele Van den Baudoin, “L’allégorie animale dans les encyclopédies latines du Moyen Âge,” in L’animal exemplaire au Moyen Âge, Ve-XVe siècles, ed. Jacques Berlioz and Marie-Anne Polo de Beaulieu (Rennes, 1991), 123–43.

  24.    Augustine, On Christian Teaching, trans. and ed. R. P. H. Green (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 2.59–61; DNR, 19.7.8–12, p. 414; Robert Sweetman, “Dominican Preaching in the Low Countries 1240–1260: Materiae Praedicabiles in the Liber de natura rerum and Bonum universale de apibus of Thomas of Cantimpré” (PhD diss., University of Toronto, 1988), 88.

  25.    Sweetman, 93; M. Michèle Mulchahey “First the Bow Is Bent in Study …”: Dominican Education Before 1350 (Toronto: PIMS, 1998), 467. Mulchahey implies that she is less sure of Thomas’s intention that the work was consciously designed as a collection of praedicabilia and that he was initially concerned more with scientific knowledge rather than morals drawn from this information by analogy (466n204). The fact that the treatise explicitly moralizes, however, supports Sweetman’s contention.

  26.    DNR, prologue, 90–96.5. Sweetman, 95. “Hiis ergo scriptis si quis studium adhibuerit, ad argumenta fidei et correctiones morum integumentis mediis sufficientiam reperiet, ut interdum predicatore quasi e vestigio scripturarum apte digresso cessantibus eloquiis prophetarum ad evigilationem brutarum mentium oculata fide creaturarum adducat testes, ut si quem sepius audita de scripturis et inculcata non movent, saltem nova in ore suo pigritantium aures demulceant.”

  27.    Sweetman, 95.

  28.    DNR, 19.7.8–12.414; Sweetman, 97.

  29.    Sweetman, 139.

  30.    Sweetman, 106.

  31.    Sweetman, 109.

  32.    Sweetman, 118. DNR, 7.31.12–8.17.260. “Dic mihi, flagitiosime serpens, quid incredibilius videretur: aut virginem sine virili semine concipere et parere, aut pisciculum semipedalem adhesione tantum tantam molem navis contra validissimos flatus retinere posse immobilem?”

  33.    Sweetman, 12.

  34.    Newman, introduction, 5.

  35.    This encounter is described in Thomas of Cantimpré, Vita Lutgardis Aquiriensis, ed. Godfrey Henschen, Acta Sanctorum III (June 16): 187–209; English translation Thomas of Cantimpré, The Life of Lutgard of Aywières, in Thomas of Cantimpré: The Collected Saints’ Lives, 211–96. Henceforth VLA in the notes. It is also addressed in the BUA, 2.30.3, p. 321. In the Vita Lutgardis, Thomas recounts that at the time of his writing, Lutgard’s prophecy had remained true for sixteen years, which places this event between 1228 and 1230. See Sweetman, “Dominican Preaching,” 12.

  36.    VMO-S, 15.

  37.    VMO-S, prologue.

  38.    VJC, 2.8b; VMO-S, prologue. Thomas quotes the passage from the VJC in the prologue to the Supplement.

  39.    McDonnell, The Beguines and Beghards, 24–25.

  40.    Thomas of Cantimpré, Vita Christina mirabilis, ed. Joannes Pinius, Acta Sanctorum V (July 24): 637–60; English translation, Thomas of Cantimpré, The Life of Christina the Astonishing, in Thomas of Cantimpré: The Collected Saints’ Lives, 127–60. Henceforth VCM in the notes.

  41.    Bolton, “Vitae Matrum,” 260.

  42.    VMO, prologue, 8.

  43.    VCM, 7.

  44.    VCM, 56. “Vigilate ergo: quia nescitis diem neque horam, qua Dominus vester venturus sit. Et quid aliud in omni vita sua Christina clamavit, nisi pœnitentiam agere, & paratos esse homines omni hora? Hoc verbis multis, hoc fletibus, hoc ejulatibus, hoc clamoribus infinitis, hoc exemplo vitæ plus docuit, plus clamavit, quam de aliquo præcedentium vel subsequentium scripto vel relatione percepimus.”

  45.    Sweetman, “Dominican Preaching,” 13. On the history and development of Dominican education, including at Saint Jacques in Paris and the four studia generalia in Cologne, Oxford, Montpellier, and Bologna, see Mulchahey, “First the Bow,” chap. 5. Mulchahey argues that the education that someone like Thomas would have received would have been centered on a curriculum that served the ends of pastoral care rather than one simply reproducing a Dominican version of secular university education, though the term studium generale was adopted from the secular context (352–53).

  46.    Thomas of Cantimpré, Vita Margarete de Ypres, in “Les Frères Prêcheurs et le mouvement dévot en Flandres au XIIIe siècle,” ed. Gérrard Meersseman, Archivum Fratrum Praedicatorum 18 (1948): 106–30; English translation, Thomas of Cantimpré, The Life Margaret of Ypres, in Thomas of Cantimpré: The Collected Saints’ Lives, 163–206. Hereafter VMY in the notes.

  47.    VMY, prologue; Carpenter, “A New Heaven,” 162.

  48.    Sweetman, “Dominican Preaching,” 14.

  49.    Sheila Fisher and Janet Halley, eds., Seeking the Woman in Late Medieval and Renaissance Writings: Essays in Feminist Contextual Criticism (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1989), 4.

  50.    VLA, 1.2–3; VMY, 6.

  51.    Margaret’s practices were said to include observation of the canonical hours, daily recitation of “four hundred Our Fathers, and as many Hail Marys and … the same number of genuflections … and fifty items from the Psalter.” In an analysis preceding his translation of the VMY, Meersseman argues in the VMY that the fifty items from the Psalter were not Psalms but fifty Hail Marys, which made up the “Psalter of the Virgin Mary” (73–76); also noted in Carpenter, “A New Heaven,” 163n160. According to Meersseman, Margaret’s practices were essentially the same as the primitive rule of the brothers and sisters of penitence, and she was, in effect, a Dominican tertiary.

  52.    VMY, 25. “At quia mutua dilectio et frequens collocucio viri cum femina maioribus nostris suspecta videtur, rogo te … si in dilectione et collocucione servi tui damnum aliquid tui amoris incurram, et ego spondeo, si tue caritati adversum invenero, numquam ei postea loquar.”

  53.    VMY, prologue.

  54.    Newman, introduction, 37. Alexandra Barratt also notes that Margaret, although living before the invention of the teenager, has many qualities we would associate with someone of such an age. Many of these teenage characteristics are apparent in Thomas’s construction of Margaret’s relationship with her mother. Barrett argues that male-authored Beguine Lives represent this relationship as a conflictual one in which the daughter—often by means of a divine father’s assistance—overcomes maternal desires. Alexandra Barratt, “Undutiful Daughters and Metaphorical Mothers Among the Beguines,” in New Trends in Feminine Spirituality: The Holy Women of Liége and Their Impact, ed. Juliette Dor et al. (Turnhout: Brepols, 1999), 82, 87.

  55.    VMY, 17. Thomas addresses “contemplative” men, powerful women, and “strong and bearded men,” whom he considers weak and effeminate when compared to Margaret’s strength.

  56.    VMY, 11. Dyan Elliott argues that Thomas believed Margaret died from her chastity, which he thought led to a disturbance of her womb, rather than any other of her austerities. Elliott understands Thomas’s constant protestations that her chaste life was not the cause of her illness and death to be evidence of that very anxiety. Dyan Elliott, in conversation with the author, July 2011.

  57.    VMY, 12.

  58.    VMY, 13.

  59.    VMY, 14.

  60.    VMY, 15.

  61.    VMY, 1. “Numquam eam ad aliquod mortale intentum animum relaxasse.” VLA, 1.12. “Ut nec tentatio carnis, aut turpis saltem cogitatio, mentem ejus ad momenti spatium perturbaret.”

  62.    VMY, 8; VLA, 1.1.

  63.    VMY, 7; VLA, 1.2.

  64.    VMY, 10; VLA, 1.3, 3.7.

  65.    VMY, 5, 55; VLA, 1.2–3.

  66.    VLA, 1.20. For the history of Cistercians in the Low Countries, see Joseph Marie Canivez, L’Ordre de Cîteaux en Belgique, des origines (1132) au XXe siècle (Forges lez-Chimay: Abbeye Cistercienne de N.D. de Scourmont, 1926). For Aywières in particular, see 172–86. For the foundation of Cisterican convents in the wake of official constraints, see Simone Roisin, “L’efflorescene cistercienne et le courant féminin de piété au xiiie siècle,” Revue d’histoire ecclésiastique 39 (1943): 342–78. Roisin notes that the monastery was originally founded in 1202 at Aywières, a village located between Huy and Liège, and was incorporated into the Cistercian order in 1210. The spiritual direction of the nuns was in the charge of the abbot of Aulne (356, 358).

  67.    VLA, 1.22.

  68.    VLA, prologue.

  69.    VLA, prologue.

  70.    VLA, 1.22.

  71.    VLA, 2.9.

  72.    VLA, 2.7.

  73.    VLA, 2.3. Lettres de Jacques de Vitry, 1160/1170–1240, ed. R. B. C. Huygens (Leiden: Brill, 1960), 79.

  74.    Simone Roisin, L’hagiographie Cistercienne dans le diocèse de Liège au XIIIe siècle (Louvain: Bibliothèque de l’Université, 1947), 5, 274. Other mystical biographies treated by Roisin include the Lives of Beatrice of Nazareth, Ida of Val-des-Roses, Ida of Louvain, and Catharine of Parc-des-Dames.

  75.    Roisin, 140.

  76.    Simone Roisin, “La méthode hagiographique de Thomas de Cantimpré,” in Miscellanea Historica in Honorem Alberti de Meyer (Louvain: Bibliothèque de l’Université, 1946), 1:546–47.

  77.    Thomas Walter Grzebien, “Penance, Purgatory, Mysticism, and Miracles: The Life, Hagiography, and Spirituality of Thomas of Cantimpré” (PhD diss., University of Notre Dame, 1989), 375.

  78.    Sweetman, “Dominican Preaching,” 14.

  79.    M. M. Mulchahey, “First the Bow,” 467.

  80.    Sweetman, “Dominican Preaching,” 15. On Middle Dutch translations of the BUA, see C. M. Stutvoet-Joanknecht, “Der byen boeck.” De Middelnederlandse vertalingen van Bonum universale de apibus van Thomas van Cantimpre en hun achtergrond (Amsterdam: VU Uitgeverij 1990). See also Wybren Scheepsma, Medieval Religious Women in the Low Countries: The Modern Devotion, the Canonesses of Windesheim, and Their Writings, trans. David F. Johnston (Martlesham: Boydell & Brewer, 2002), for a brief discussion of the afterlife of the vernacularized BUA.

  81.    Sweetman, 163.

  82.    BUA, epistolaauctoris, 1; “Acta capitulorum generalium ordinis praedicatorum,” in Monumenta ordinis praedicatorum historica, Tomus 3, vol. 1, ed. Benedictus Maria Reichert Frühwirth and Franz Andreas Früwirth (Rome, 1898), 3:83. “Item. Quicumque prior sciverit vel audiverit aliquod miraculum vel factum edificatorium contigisse in ordine vel propter ordinem, scribat magistro diligenter, ut possint in posterum reservari ad utilitatem futurorum.” Other notable collections likewise inspired by this call are Stephen of Bourbon’s exempla collection and Gerard of Fracheto’s Vitae Fratrum. See Michael E. Goodich, “A Note on Sainthood and the Hagiographical Prologue,” in Lives and Miracles of the Saints: Studies in Medieval Latin Hagiography (Cornwall: Ashgate, 2004), part 9, 173.

  83.    Sweetman, “Dominican Preaching,” 158.

  84.    BUA, epistolaauctoris, 1. The technical definition of the exemplum provided by Claude Brémond, Jacques Le Goff, and Jean-Claude Schmitt in L’exemplum (Turnhout: Brepols, 1982), 37–38, is “un récit bref donné comme véridique et destiné à être inséré dans un discours (en général dans un sermon) pour convaincre un auditoire par un leçon salutaire.” Alessandro Vitale-Brovarone argues that it is impossible to define the medieval exemplum according to a standardized typology. Vitale-Brovarone, “Persuasione e narrazione: l’Exemplum tra due retoriche (VI–XII secoli),” in Mélanges de l’école française de Rome—Moyen Âge—Temps Modernes 92, part 1 (1980): 95. In this, he follows T. F. Crane, who, in his 1890 anthology and translation of James of Vitry’s Sermones Vulgares, notes that there was no single criterion used by medieval compilers of exempla collections for preachers. Moral reflection, biography, and historical events were all used to provide material for preachers. See Jacques de Vitry, The Exempla, xlvii. F. Tubach likewise argues that literature considered to be an exemplum widely varied (including biography, history, and fable), but was determined by the same rhetorical function: “The exemplum is an attempt to discover in each narrative event, character, situation or act a paradigmatic sign that would either substantiate religious beliefs and church dogma or delineate social ills and human foibles.” Tubach, Index Exemplorum (Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia, 1979), 523.

  85.    BUA, epistolaauctoris, 1.

  86.    Jacques de Vitry, The Exempla, xci. Crane further notes that more than one hundred years later, Thomas’s treatise would inspire a similar work by fellow Dominican Johannes Nider (b. 1380), though the ant would, in this case, take the place of the bee. Nider’s De formicarius was written, he explains in the prologue, in response to the sentiment that miracles and revelations were no longer manifest in Germany. Like Thomas, Nider writes that his treatise records contemporary instances of divine intervention that he saw or heard of. These tales were organized according to the sixty qualities of the ant and are—unlike the De apibus, though like Gregory’s Dialogues and Caesarius of Heisterbach’s Dialogus Miraculorum—told through a dialogue between a dull-witted man and the master Theologus (xcii). For other sources on the history of the example in sermons, see Charles H. Haskins, “The University of Paris in the Sermons the Thirteenth Century,” American Historical Review 10 (1904): 1–27.

  87.    McDonnell, The Beguines and Beghards, 395. There are at least sixty manuscripts of the Latin version of the BUA, and two Flemish translations in at least twelve manuscripts. For details on the manuscripts, see Wouter Antoine Van der Vet, Het Biënboec Van Thomas Van Cantimpré En Zijn Exempelen (S-Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff, 1902), 408ff.

  88.    McDonnell, 200n103. McDonnell notes that Stephen made great use of secondary sources (in particular, the work of James) and reveals very little personal knowledge of the mulieres religiosae of the region, in stark contrast with what we might call Thomas’s “field work” approach.

  89.    Jean-Claude Schmitt, Ghosts in the Middle Ages: The Living and the Dead in Medieval Society, trans. Teresa Lavender Fagan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 124.

  90.    Sweetman, “Dominican Preaching,” 185.

  91.    Mulchahey, “First the Bow,” 461. “Quoniam plus exempla quam verba movent secundum Gregorium et facilius intellectu capiuntur et alicuius memoria infiguntur.”

  92.    McDonnell, The Beguines and Beghards, 29. The medieval use of the example in hagiography is ultimately a Christianized version of the classical understanding of history as teaching philosophy through examples in which the life of the saint teaches the virtue and holiness to believers through their example. See Goodich, “A Note on Sainthood,” 171; on the homiletic exemplum, see Peter von Moos, “L’exemplum et les Exempla des Prêcheurs,” in Les Exempla Medievaux: Nouvelles Perspectives, ed. Jacques Berlioz and Marie Anne Polo de Beaulieu (Paris: H. Champion, 1998), 67–81.

  93.    VMO, 5:547. “Multis enim incitantur exemplis, qui non moventur praeceptis.”

  94.    VMO, 5:547.

  95.    It is interesting that none of the sponsors and advisers of the mulieres religiosiae working in the region (including James, Guy, and John of Nivelles; John of Liro; and Thomas of Cantimpré) created vernacular moral literature. However, Ernest McDonnell argues that the Latin vitae of the thirteenth century (including the Lives of Beatrice of Nazareth, Juliana of Cornillon, Ida of Louvain, Ida of Nivelles, Christina mirabilis, and Lutgard) are fundamentally formed by and would in fact have been impossible without vernacular materials. McDonnell, The Beguines and Beghards, 394. The question of how exactly such exempla collections were used beyond the insertion of smaller narrative units into sermons remains open for further study. McDonnell does note that the Beguines of Léau, to whom Beatrice of Nazareth’s father sent her as a child to be educated, used exempla as a key technique for edification (29).

  96.    VJC, 244; Sweetman, “Dominican Preaching,” 15.

  97.    Carpenter, “A New Heaven,” 7.

  98.    Carpenter, 8.

  99.    Carpenter, 10.

100.    Walter Simons, Cities of Ladies: Beguine Communities in the Medieval Low Countries 1200–1565 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 2.

101.    Carpenter, “A New Heaven,” 10n11.

102.    Carpenter, 12; Simons, Cities of Ladies, 4.

103.    John’s parents lived “by the work of their hands” in the city of Cambrai, but they were able to earn enough money to send John to study theology in Paris (VJC, 1.1); Christina was born of “respectable (honestis) parents” in the town of Sint-Truiden (VCM, 4), and the same adjective was given to Margaret’s parents in the city of Ypres (VMY, 1). On the adjectives honestus and mediocris used to describe the families of mulieres religiosae, see McDonnell, The Beguines and Beghards, 81–100; Carpenter, 12n17.

104.    Simons, Cities of Ladies, 7.

105.    Carpenter, “A New Heaven,” 14. On the perception that the Gregorian reforms were novel creations, see Beryl Smalley, “Ecclesiastical Attitudes to Novelty, c. 1100–1250,” in Studies in Medieval Thought and Learning: From Abelard to Wyclif (London: Hambledon, 1981), 97.

106.    Herbert Grundmann, Religious Movements in the Middle Ages: The Historical Links Between Heresy, the Mendicant Orders, and the Women’s Religious Movement in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Century, with the Historical Foundations of German Mysticism, trans. Steven Rowan (Notre Dame IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995), 8.

107.    André Vauchez, “Lay People’s Sanctity in Western Europe,” in Images of Sainthood in Medieval Europe, ed. Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski and Timea Szell (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), 26–30. Vauchez notes that in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, holiness was largely considered a grace that was transmitted through family lines. The Mediterranean regions of the twelfth century venerated nonnoble laity, and such a practice was common in urban areas of northern Italy in which the communes were liberating themselves from feudal overlords or imperial rule. In the north, such a shift is not apparent in the hagiographical record until the thirteenth century, and despite the number of such vitae following the VMO, most of the Lives of Beguines were not abundantly copied or vernacularized until much later. The famous saints of the period are still, as a result, “princesses and kings.” However, Vauchez argues that the figuration of such aristocratic saints is altered in light of the ideals of the vita apostolica such that they were “influenced by the new spirituality based on humility, charity, and poverty” (30).

108.    In support of Grundmann’s argument, Walter Simons notes that the eleventh-century cases of heresy in Arras and Cambrai—the most economically advanced areas of the Southern Low Countries at the time—turned not on issues of dogma but on critiques of the clergy. In Arras, some laypersons were condemned for questioning the validity of baptism by immoral priests. In Cambrai, a layman accused the local bishop of simony and refused to take the Eucharist administered by him. He was killed by the bishop’s henchmen. Simons, Cities of Ladies, 15.

109.    Grundmann, Religious Movements, 9.

110.    Simons, Cities of Ladies, 28.

111.    Simons, 30.

112.    Simons, 34.

113.    McDonnell, The Beguines and Beghards, 71ff.; Paul Mommaers and Elizabeth M. Dutton, Hadewijch: Writer, Beguine, Love Mystic (Louvain: Peeters, 2004), 19–21.

114.    Grundmann, Religious Movements, 83. For a discussion of the question of whether there was indeed a basic transformation in the nature of women’s participation in religious life in Europe in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries such that it could be called a “movement,” see Jocelyn Wogan-Browne and Marie Élisabeth Hennau, “Introduction: Liège, the Medieval ‘Woman Question,’ and the Question of Medieval Women,” in New Trends in Feminine Spirituality: The Holy Women of Liège and their Impact, ed. Juliette Dor, Lesley Johnson, and Jocelyn Wogan-Browne (Turnhout: Brepols, 1999), 1–34. They argue that the question remains unresolved. For a critique of Grundmann’s synthetic approach to Beguine historiography, which she argues occludes important details because of its generalizing approach, see Joanna Ziegler, “The Curtis Beguinages in the Southern Low Countries and Art Patronage: Interpretation and Historiography,” Bulletin de l’Institute Historique Belge de Rome 57 (1987): 31–70. Scholars working with Grundmann’s approach and following from his arguments include, Ziegler argues, Malcolm Lambert, Gordon Leff, Robert Lerner, J. B. Freed, and Brenda Bolton (48n36). Carolyn Walker Bynum also notes his importance in her work in Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 17ff. Bolton counters Ziegler, writing that “the existence of variations within the whole should not invalidate the proposition that, compared with religious women elsewhere, these women of the Low Countries were special,” a uniqueness that becomes apparent through a synthetic examination of broader organizational and religious patterns. Brenda Bolton, “Thirteenth-Century Religious Women: Further Reflections on the Low Countries ‘Special Case,’ ” in Dor et al., New Trends in Feminine Spirituality, 130ff. Moreover, along with microhistories of particular communities or particular forms of women’s religious life, questions of the intersections, overlaps, and lines of influence between different groups remain important as the incredible vocational variety and networks of relationships in the region suggest a vitality and influence that significantly transcends the boundaries of particular orders, communities, or gender.

115.    Bolton, “Vitae Matrum,” 260. Other women from the region who were made hagiographical subjects and testify to the diversity of religious expression available and celebrated are the widow and recluse Ivetta of Huy (1157–1228); the widow and Beguine Odilia of Liège (d. 1220); the Cistercian nun Ida of Nivelles (d. 1231); Juliana of Cornillon (d. 1258), who lived as a hospital sister, an Augustinian nun, an uncloistered Beguine, a Cistercian nun, and a recluse; the Cistercian nun Beatrice of Nazareth (d. 1268); the Cistercian Alice of Schaerbeek (d. 1250); the recluse then Cistercian nun Elizabeth of Spalbeek (d. ca. 1270); and Ida of Léau (d. ca. 1260), a Cistercian nun.

116.    VJC, 1.3–4.

117.    Simons, Cities of Ladies, 21.

118.    Bolton, “Vitae Matrum,” 260.

119.    C. H. Lawrence, The Friars: The Impact of the Early Mendicant Movement on Western Society (London: Longman, 1994), 65. The monastic tradition was apparent in the friars’ domestic life, as they organized the day according to the choral recitation of the divine office, fasting in monastic periods, and observing silence within the house at all times. However, the offices were to be sung breviter in order to leave more time for studying, and manual labor was no longer required (81).

120.    Joseph Lynch, The Medieval Church: A Brief History (London: Longman, 1992), 235–36; Lawrence, The Friars, 67–69.

121.    Grundmann, Religious Movements, 31.

122.    Lester K. Little, Religious Poverty and the Profit Economy in Medieval Europe (London: P. Elek, 1978), 161. In addition to their highly popular sermons, which attracted large crowds, the Dominicans converted Compline into a service open to the public, where the townspeople would chant the “Salve Regina.” This became highly popular.

123.    The Dominican order attracted women from the time of its inception. A foundation at Prouille was created by Diego of Osma as a place for female converts from Catharism. Dominic established a nunnery of “preacheresses” in Madrid. However, Dominic never envisioned or supported female adoption of the mendicant life. The foundation at Prouille was one of strict enclosure, modeled on Premontré. Over the course of the thirteenth century, the Dominican treatment of women became highly complex. In 1228, the general chapter legislated to end the further extension of ministry to nunneries, and the history of the mid-thirteenth century involves Dominican nuns being “cast off by their parent orders.” However, after several decades of struggle, women’s houses won recognition from the Dominican cardinal Hugh of Saint Cher (d. 1263) and Master General Humbert of Romans (d. 1277). Humbert declared that the friars were obliged to provide spiritual care for nuns. He drafted new constitutions for women’s convents in order to standardize observance, which were approved in 1259. In so doing, legal existence was given to the Dominican Second Order. Lawrence, The Friars, 81.

124.    Peter Brooks addresses the way in which confession articulates and forms the interiority of the one confessing in Troubling Confessions: Speaking Guilt in Law and Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). Chapter 1 addresses Lateran IV.

125.    VLA, 2.17.

126.    VMY, 20.

127.    Dyan Elliott, Proving Woman: Female Spirituality and Inquisitional Culture in the Later Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 58.

128.    Roisin, L’hagiographie Cistercienne, 92–93. She argues that the extremity of these ascetic practices contradicted the Cistercian ideal of moderation.

129.    Elliott, Proving Woman, chap. 2. The apogee of such Eucharistic veneration practiced by a woman and hagiographically enshrined by a cleric in the region is found with Juliana of Cornillon (d. 1258), whose life was spent advocating for the adoption of “the feast of the sacrament,” later named Corpus Christi. See Vita Sanctae Julianae Virginis, ed. G. Henschenius and D. Papebroch, Acta Sanctorum, Apr. t. I (Paris, 1866): 435–75; The Life of Blessed Juliana of Mont Cornillon, trans. Barbara Newman (Toronto: Peregrina, 1988); G. Simenon, “Les Origines de la Fête-Dieu,” Revue ecclésiastique de Liège 13 (1922): 345–58; W. Vowles, “Eva, Recluse, and the Feast of Corpus Christi,” Downside Review 58 (1940): 420–37; Miri Rubin, Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), esp. 164–76, on the ways in which relationships between men and women in Liège contributed to the development of the feast; Sara Beckwith, Christ’s Body: Identity, Culture, and Society in Late Medieval Writings (New York: Routledge, 1993).

130.    Bolton, “Mulieres Sanctae,” 156n35; McDonnell, The Beguines and Beghards, 4. On Fulk and the Cathars and Waldensians more generally in Languedoc, see C. Thouzellier, Catharisme et Valdéisme en Languedoc à la fin du xii siècle et au début du XIIIe siècle, 1st ed. (Paris: Presses Universitaire de France, 1966).

131.    Thus, Grundmann, based on the representation of admiration for clerics in their vitae, was able to write that the women’s religious movement differentiated itself from the “heretical poverty movement” by its lack of those Donatist-like demands that initially inspired such lay religiosity. Grundmann, Religious Movements, 83.

132.    Simons, Cities of Ladies, 17.

133.    Elliott, Proving Woman, 70. In so doing, Elliott understands Thomas to be at least indirectly responsible for the later criminalization of women’s spirituality, for even as he uses women as proof of orthodoxy, he advocates a procedure of proving such orthodoxy through submission to priestly authority, an authority which, by the end of the fourteenth century, would be used to systematically and skeptically scrutinize women’s spiritual claims (2).

134.    Simons, Cities of Ladies, 19.

135.    McDonnell, The Beguines and Beghards, 4.

136.    Rebecca Garber, Feminine Figurae: Representations of Gender in Religious Texts by Medieval German Women Writers, 1100–1375 (New York: Routledge, 2013), 28.

137.    As Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski notes, any new monastic or devotional movement would be cause for distrust on the part of older orders. Such suspicion was “especially acute” for uncloistered Beguines who did not take perpetual vows. Blumenfeld-Kosinski, “Satirical Views of the Beguines in Northern French Literature,” in Dor et al., New Trends in Feminine Spirituality, 238.

138.    Bolton, “Vitae Matrum,” 267. In this, Bolton follows Roisin, who, in L’hagiographie Cistercienne, 8–9, as I have noted, argued that the novel piety of the region was a result of the mingling of Beguinal and Bernadine streams of devotion, doctrine, and practice.

139.    VMO, 1.22.

140.    VCM, 9–20; VMY, 41–50.

141.    VMO, prologue, 7.

142.    VMO, prologue, 6. On the importance of the VMO and its relationship to antiheretical preaching, see André Vauchez, “Prosélytisme et action antihérétique en milieu féminine au XIIIe siècle: La vie de Marie d’Oignies (+1213) par Jacques de Vitry,” in Propagande et contre-propagande religieuses, Actes colloque de l’Institute d’études des religions de l’Université libre de Bruxelles (Brussels 1987), 95–110.

143.    Bernard McGinn, The Flowering of Mysticism: Men, Women and the New Mysticism (1200–1350), The Presence of God: A History of Western Christian Mysticism 3 (New York: Crossroad, 1998), 37–38.

144.    On the self-consciousness and defensive tone of some hagiographers in response to the skepticism regarding miracles in this period, see Goodich, “A Note on Sainthood,” 170–71.

145.    Cynthia Hahn, Portrayed on the Heart: Narrative Effect in Pictorial Lives of Saints from the Tenth Through the Thirteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 35.

146.    James was not successful in this bid, arriving in Perugia at the time when Innocent III died and following the disapproval of novel religious orders at Lateran IV. From Honorius III he was able to obtain oral permission for the Beguines in Flanders, France, and the empire to live communally and mutually exhort each other. Lettres de Jacques de Vitry, 71–78; Bolton, “Mulieres Sanctae,” 145–46. By the end of the thirteenth century, the city of Liège alone had twenty-four Beguinages, and the oldest one of the city, Saint Christophe, had more than 1,500 women. In the diocese of Liège, forty-seven Beguinages are on record from the thirteenth century. For a detailed history of the diocese of Liège in relation to female piety, see Wogan-Browne and Henneau, “Introduction,” 11.

147.    Brenda Bolton, “Some Thirteenth Century Women: A Special Case?” in Nederlands archief voor kerkgeschiedenis 61, no. 1 (1981): 18.

148.    VMO, prologue, 10.

149.    Bolton, “Some Thirteenth Century Women,” 19. Other important supporters of the Beguines included the Cistercian Caesarius of Heisterbach, who wrote that although the religious women of Liège lived in the world, their charity was often greater than that of their cloistered sisters. Humbert of Romans spoke of the Beguines of the Low Countries as “those happy beguines, most worthy of praise, who in the midst of a perverse generation are leading lives of the greatest sanctity.” Two English contemporaries, Robert Grosseteste and Matthew Paris, were also champions. Grosseteste used the Beguines as exemplars of piety to inspire Franciscan friars in their efforts to truly practice poverty. In his Chronicles, Matthew Paris speaks likewise of the notable frugality and manual labor of Beguines. See Bolton, “Thirteenth-Century Religious Women,” 132. For an attempt to move beyond the agonistic representation of the Beguines as under threat, in crisis, or on the “outside” of ecclesiastical centers, see Jennifer Kolpacoff Deane, “Did Beguines Have a Late-Medieval Crisis? Historical Models and Historiographical Martyrs,” in Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal 8 (2013): 275–88.

150.    VLA, 3.5.

151.    Bolton, “Some Thirteenth Century Women,” 19.

152.    Bolton, 20; Blumenfeld-Kosinski, “Satirical Views of the Beguines,” 239–40. On Gautier, see Erhard Lommatzsch, Gautier de Coincy als Satiriker (Halle: Niemeyer, 1913).

153.    Blumenfeld-Kosinski, 241. Thus she notes that Rutebeuf critiqued the Carmelites alongside the Beguines. For further discussion of the treatment of Beguines in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, see Walter Simons, “The Beguine Movement in the Southern Low Countries. A Reassesment,” Bulletin de l’Institut Historique Belge de Rome 49 (1989): 76–77; Ursula Peters, Religiöse Erfahrung als literarisches Faktum. Zur Vorgeschichte und Genese frauenmystischer Texte des 13. und 14 Jahrhunderts (Tubingen: Niemeyer, 1988); Anke Passenier, “ ‘Women on the Loose.’ Stereotypes of Women in the Stories of Medieval Beguines,” in Female Stereotypes in Religious Traditions, ed. Ria Kloppenborg and Wouter J. Hanegraaff (Leiden: Brill, 1995), 61–88.

154.    Smalley, “Ecclesiastical Attitudes to Novelty,” 97.

155.    Smalley, 98.

2. “WITH WONDROUS HORROR SHE FLED”

    1.    Thomas of Cantimpré, Vita Christina mirabilis, ed. Joannes Pinius, Acta Sanctorum V (July 24), 637–60; English translation, Thomas of Cantimpré, The Life of Christina the Astonishing, in Thomas of Cantimpré: The Collected Saints’ Lives, ed. Barbara Newman, trans. Barbara Newman and Margot H. King (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008), 127–57. Henceforth cited as VCM in the notes. Unless otherwise stated, translations are from Newman and King and are altered for gender inclusivity of the Latin.

    2.    VCM, 2–3.

    3.    VCM, 3.

    4.    Robert Sweetman, “Dominican Preaching in the Low Countries 1240–1260: Materiae Praedicabiles in the Liber de natura rerum and Bonum universale de apibus of Thomas of Cantimpré” (PhD diss., University of Toronto, 1988), 135.

    5.    Christina’s vita shares many of the aesthetic qualities that Peter Brooks identifies as constitutive of melodrama, a genre that he argues is essentially about the representation of the good through an aesthetic of excess (including hyperbole, a Manichean worldview, heroism sculpted by trauma, tests, victories, exaggerated gestures) that facilitates the recognition of virtue in a world in which the portrayal and apprehension of the good and the true had entered a state of severe crisis. Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama and the Mode of Excess (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 42–43. Melodrama culminates in a “movement of astonishment,” which is, Brooks argues, exemplary, meaning that it provides a clear model for spectators to admire and imitate (26). The astonishment provoked by the VCM, although also in service of representing the good, has the opposite effect of that described by Brooks insofar as it instigates confusion and misinterpretation. See also Amy Hollywood, “Breaking the Waves and the Hagiographical Imagination,” unpublished talk, 1.

    6.    VCM, 20.

    7.    On the crucial role of truth in effecting spiritual transformation, particularly compunction, in audiences of hagiography, see Cynthia Hahn’s discussion in Portrayed on the Heart: Narrative Effect in Pictorial Lives of Saints from the Tenth Through the Thirteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 31–32. In this regard, Hahn notes Hans Robert Jauss’s argument that the exemplary derives its power from its being rooted in fact rather than the imaginary, to which it was considered superior by medieval authors. The identification and pity of the audience is elicited by the truth of the figures represented, and it is this truth that was understood to more effectively inspire compunction.

    8.    Hahn, 33; Thomas of Cantimpré, Vita Ioannis Cantimpratensis, in “Une oeuvre inédite de Thomas de Cantimpré: la ‘Vita Ioannis Cantimpratensis,’ ” ed. Robert Godding, Revue d’histoire ecclésiastique 76 (1981): 2.8b; English translation, Thomas of Cantimpré, The Life of Abbot John of Cantimpré, in Thomas of Cantimpré: The Collected Saints’ Lives, 57–124. Henceforth VJC in the notes.

    9.    VCM, 10, 46.

  10.    Barbara Newman, “Possessed by the Spirit: Devout Women, Demoniacs, and the Apostolic Life in the Thirteenth Century,” Speculum 73, no. 3 (July 1998): 733–70.

  11.    Robert Sweetman, “Christine of Saint-Trond’s Preaching Apostolate: Thomas of Cantimpré’s Hagiographical Method Revisited,” Vox Benedictina 10, no. 1 (July 1992): 68.

  12.    Barbara Newman, From Virile Woman to WomanChrist: Studies in Medieval Religion and Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), 108–36; JoAnne McNamara, “The Need to Give: Suffering and Female Sanctity in the Middle Ages,” in Images of Sainthood in Medieval Europe, ed. Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski and Timea Szell (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), 199–221.

  13.    Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 30, 115, 120, 203, 274; Walter Simons, “Reading a Saint’s Body: Rapture and Bodily Movement in the Vitae of Thirteenth-Century Beguines,” in Framing Medieval Bodies, ed. Sarah Kay and Miri Rubin (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994).

  14.    Laurie Finke, “Mystical Bodies and the Dialogics of Vision,” in Maps of Flesh and Light: The Religious Experience of Medieval Women Mystics, ed. Ulrike Wiethaus (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1993), 37–38. One could construct an interesting paper by arguing that rather than being a somber presentation of a saintly figure and the horrors of purgatory offered in earnest, the vita is an entertainment text meant to amuse its readers by satirizing contemporary women’s piety.

  15.    Mark Jordan, “Missing Scenes,” Harvard Divinity Bulletin 38, nos. 3/4 (Summer/Autumn 2010), www.hds.harvard.edu/news/bulletin_mag/articles/38–34/jordan.html, accessed July 6, 2011.

  16.    David Williams, Deformed Discourse: The Function of the Monster in Medieval Thought and Literature (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 1996), 4.

  17.    This chapter is concerned with the ways in which the vita attempts to teach and reflect on the act of reading a wondrous hagiography. As such, it is not concerned with the reception of the vita in the centuries after its composition, a project of great interest in its own right. Christina’s Life was transmitted in eighteen Latin and seven vernacular manuscripts. Copies were owned by very different communities. The breadth of interest in the vita can be seen, for example, in the late thirteenth-century rhyming version of her Life in Middle Dutch (Amsterdam, UB, I G56), which was composed for Benedictine nuns, and a fifteenth-century Carthusian manuscript from Trier (Brussels, KB, 8060–64). These texts testify to continued interest in Christina among male monastics in the early-modern period. An earlier manuscript (Brussels, KB, 4459–70) of 1320 from the Cistercian monastery at Villers contains, in addition to Christina’s vita, texts on Cistercian spirituality and the history of the abbey. This monastery, as Simone Roisin’s work has shown, was crucial in the production of Lives that reflect the “Beguinal-Cistercian” milieu of the Low Countries in the thirteenth century and the writing of mystical biography. See Simone Roisin, L’hagiographie Cistercienne dans le diocèse de Liège au XIIIe siècle (Louvain: Bibliothèque de l’Université, 1947). Goswin of Bossut, a cantor at Villers (b. ca. 1190?), wrote The Life of Ida of Nivelles, which was studied by Roisin in this regard. Roisin argues that Christina’s vita does not demonstrate the hallmarks of mystical biography because of its focus on external marks of piety. See Simone Roisin, “La méthode hagiographique de Thomas de Cantimpré,” in Miscellanea Historica in honorem Alberti de Meyer (Louvain: Bibliothèque de l’Université, 1946), 1:553. For Roisin, Thomas’s hagiographical career evidences an evolution toward interior spirituality, which she explicitly marks as a Cistercian influence. However, this chapter argues that the VCM is, in fact, an instance of mystical theology in hagiographical mode, and the presence of the VCM in this manuscript collection indicates its interest to the Cistercian monks who collected it alongside classic works of Cistercian spirituality. For English translations of Goswin’s Lives, see Goswin of Bossut, Send Me God: The Lives of Ida the Compassionate of Nivelles, Nun of La Ramée, Arnulf, Lay Brother of Villers, and Abundus, Monk of Villers, trans. Martinus Cawley (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003).

  18.    Jacques de Vitry, Vita Mariae Oigniacensis, ed. Daniel Papebroech, Acta Sanctorum XXV (June 23): 542–72; English translation, Jacques de Vitry, The Life of Mary of Oignies, trans. Margot H. King, in Mary of Oignies, Mother of Salvation, ed. Anneke B. Mulder-Bakker (Turnhout: Brepols, 2006), prologue, 10. Hereafter cited as VMO in the notes.

  19.    VMO, prologue, 3.

  20.    On the suspicious attitude toward female mendicancy, see Walter Simons, Cities of Ladies: Beguine Communities in the Medieval Low Countries, 1200–1565 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 7; Herbert Grundmann, Religious Movements in the Middle Ages: The Historical Links Between Heresy, the Mendicant Orders, and the Women’s Religious Movement in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Century, with the Historical Foundations of German Mysticism, trans. Steven Rowan (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 1995), 91. William of Saint-Amour, a fierce critic of the Beguines and Mendicant orders, saw begging as a sign of depravity, writing “Periculum est in mendicando,” in order to argue for allowing mendicancy only by those who were truly needy (an argument rejected in 1256). See Heinrich Denzinger, Enchiridion Symbolorum, definitionum et declarationum de rebus fidei et morum (Freiburg: Herder, 1921), 200; Ernst McDonnell, The Beguines and Beghards in Medieval Culture: With Special Emphasis on the Belgian Scene (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press), 143, 458.

  21.    VMO, prologue, 8. “Vidi etiam aliam, circa quam tam mirabiliter operatus est Dominus, quod cum diu mortua jacuisset, antequam in terra corpus ejus sepeliretur, anima ad corpus revertente revixit; & a Domino obtinuit, ut in hoc seculo vivens in corpore, purgatorium sustineret. Unde longo tempore ita mirabiliter a Domino afflicta est, ut quandoque se volutaret in ignem, & quandoque in hieme in aqua glaciali diu moraretur, quandoque etiam sepulcra mortuorum intrare cogeretur. Tandem in tanta post peractam pœnitentiam vixit pace, & tantam a Domino gratiam promeruit, ut multoties rapta in spiritu, animas defunctorum usque in purgatorium, vel per purgatorium sine aliqua laesione usque ad superna regna conduceret.”

  22.    VCM, 4.

  23.    VCM, 4.

  24.    VCM, 6.

  25.    VCM, 7. “Aut ad corpus reverti, ibique [agere pœnas] immortalis animæ per mortale corpus sine detrimento sui, omnesque illas animas, quas in illo purgatorii loco miserata es, ipsis tuis pœnis eripere: homines vero viventes exemplo pœnæ & vitæ tuæ converti ad me, & a sceleribus resilire, peractisque omnibus, ad me tandem multorum præmiorum mercede te cumulatam reverti.”

  26.    VMO, prologue, 8; VCM, prologue, 1.

  27.    VCM, 13.

  28.    VCM, 9, 11, 19.

  29.    VCM, 15, 5.

  30.    VCM, 16.

  31.    VCM, 9, 19.

  32.    VCM, prologue, 2.

  33.    VCM, 9, 10, 17; cf. Mark 3:21.

  34.    VCM, 18, 19.

  35.    Thomas of Cantimpré, Vita Lutgardis Aquiriensis, ed. Godfrey Henschen, Acta Sanctorum III (June 16): 187–209; English translation, Thomas of Cantimpré, The Life of Lutgard of Aywières, in Thomas of Cantimpré: The Collected Saints’ Lives, 211–96. Henceforth VLA in the notes. VLA, 2.23.

  36.    VCM, 14.

  37.    VCM, 20.

  38.    André Vauchez, Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages, trans. Jean Birrell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 435.

  39.    Vauchez, 439.

  40.    Vauchez, 435.

  41.    Vauchez, 438.

  42.    Vauchez, 439.

  43.    On these qualities of the resurrected body, see the Summa Theologiae Supplementum q. 82–85, a. 1. Subtilitas entails the freedom of the body from material restraint while remaining palpable. Agilitas gives the resurrected body complete freedom of movement as the soul perfectly directs the body. Impassibilitas is immunity from pain and death. Claritas occurs when the glory of soul is completely visible in the body, making it beautiful and radiant.

  44.    Summa Theologiae Supplementum q. 70, a. 3.

  45.    Summa Theologiae Supplementum appendix 1, q. 2, a. 1. “In Purgatory there will be a twofold pain; one will be the pain of loss, namely the delay of the divine vision, and the pain of sense, namely punishment by corporeal fire … since pain is not hurt, but the sense of hurt, the more sensitive a thing is, the greater the pain caused by that which hurts it: wherefore hurts inflicted on the more sensible parts cause the greatest pain. And, because all bodily sensation is from the soul, it follows of necessity that the soul feels the greatest pain when a hurt is inflicted on the soul itself.”

  46.    Caroline Walker Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 293–94.

  47.    The phrase “aerial bodies” is from Bynum’s Resurrection (300–301). See Dante, Purgatorio 3.16–30, for Dante’s realization that “the light was shattered” by resting on his body but that Virgil’s body cast no shadow. Echoing the theological traditions I have noted here, while reflecting on the shadowless forms of purgatory, Virgil tells Dante, “The Power has disposed such bodiless / bodies to suffer torments, heat and cold; / how this is done, He would not have us know” (3.31–33). Dante, The Divine Comedy, trans. Allen Mandelbaum (New York: Knopf, 1984).

  48.    VCM, 46.

  49.    Sweetman, “Christine of Saint-Trond’s Preaching Apostolate,” 68. See also Mary Carruthers, The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400–1200 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 101–5.

  50.    Thus, Thomas’s superior, the minister general of the Dominicans, Humbert of Romans, wrote, “It is not much use knowing that it is necessary for our conduct to be good and knowing what this consists of, unless our conduct actually is good; so we must consider what will help us to achieve it.” See Simon Tugwell, ed., Early Dominicans: Selected Writings (New York: Paulist Press, 1982), 293.

  51.    Following the example of the demoniac who confessed Jesus’s true nature by addressing him as “Jesus, son of the most high God” (Mark 5:7), demons and demoniacs are believed in many medieval texts to be capable of being effective witnesses to divine truth. They are, nevertheless, also figured as masters of dissimulation. Thomas’s exempla collection, Bonum universale de apibus, contains many examples of demonic deception, including one, discussed here in chapter 7, where a demon disguised as a monk convinces a young woman who was raped by her father to drown her newborn in order to avoid scandal. Thomas of Cantimpré, Bonum universale de apibus, ed. Georges Colvener (Duaci: Balatazaris Belleri, 1697), 2.29.21.

  52.    Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, “The Celestial Hierarchy,” in Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, trans. Colm Luibheid and Paul Rorem (New York: Paulist Press, 1987), 121b. Hereafter CH in the notes.

  53.    CH, 121d.

  54.    CH, 121c. See Eric D. Perl, Theophany: The Neoplatonic Philosophy of Dionysius the Areopagite (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2007), 101, for an explanation of Dionysius’s notion of being as theophany.

  55.    CH, 121d.

  56.    CH, 140c.

  57.    CH, 141a.

  58.    Perl, Theophany, 101. Perl refers to the distinction between sensible symbols and intelligible names, but this distinction parallels and is structurally the same as that between the dissimilar and similar images.

  59.    CH, 141b; Paul Rorem, Pseudo-Dionysius: A Commentary on the Texts and an Introduction to Their Influence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 56.

  60.    Karen A. Winstead, Virgin Martyrs: Legends of Sainthood in Late Medieval England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), 5.

  61.    VCM, 18.

  62.    VCM, 21.

  63.    While Laura Finke (“Mystical Bodies,” 37–38) argues that Christina’s sufferings are self-inflicted and thus very different than a virgin martyr’s death at the hand of the state, questions of agency are difficult to neatly compartmentalize in these situations. A common trope of virgin-martyr tales is the virgin’s refusal of clemency that is repeatedly offered so that the martyrdom can be said to be “chosen,” even as Christina’s tortures, though chosen and executed by her, are typically described as being the result of a divine agent by whom she is driven to undertake painful acts. This drivenness can, in part, be understood as a quality of her resurrected flesh, like that of the elect whose resurrected bodies manifest claritas by virtue, as the author of the Summa Theologica Supplementum puts it, of the overflow of the soul into the body. Thus, Christina is said by Thomas to be almost entirely “controlled” by the spirit (VCM, 46). On claritas, see Summa Theologiae Supplementum q. 85, a. 1.

  64.    Winstead, Virgin Martyrs, 73–75.

  65.    See, for example, the Exordium Parvum, chap. 3, which speaks of Citeaux as a “desert.”

  66.    VCM, 9. Brenda Bolton first noted the connections between Thomas and James of Vitry’s work and the desert tradition in her essay “Vitae Matrum: A Further Aspect of the Frauenfrage,” in Medieval Women: Essays Dedicated and Presented to Prof. Rosalind M. T. Hill, ed. Derek Baker (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1978), 253–75.

  67.    VCM, 13.

  68.    Margot H. King, “The Desert Mothers,” Vox Benedictina 5, no. 4 (October 1988): 325–54.2

  69.    Athanasius of Alexandria, “The Life and Affairs of Our Holy Father Antony,” in The Life of Antony and the Letter to Marcellinus, trans. Alan C. Gregg, Classics of Western Spirituality (New York: Paulist Press, 1980), 42, 65.

  70.    See Peter Brown, “The Rise and Function of the Holy Man in Late Antiquity,” Journal of Roman Studies 61 (1971): 87–88.

  71.    Pseudo-Athanasius, The Life and Regimen of the Blessed and Holy Teacher, Syncletica, trans. Elizabeth Bryson Bongie (Toronto: Peregrina, 1997), 15.

  72.    VCM, 23.

  73.    Pseudo-Athanasius, The Life and Regimen, 20b.

  74.    VCM, 26.

  75.    VCM, 29.

  76.    Pseudo-Athanasius, The Life and Regimen, 16.

  77.    Pseudo-Athanasius, 11–12. “One could consider her the true disciple of the blessed Thecla as she followed her in the same teaching. Indeed, Christ was the one suitor of the two women, and for them both Paul was himself the ‘leader of the bride.’ ”

  78.    Athanasius of Alexandria, Vie D’Antoine, Sources Chrétiennes 400, ed. G. J. M Bartelink (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 2004), sec. 14, 272. “The state of his soul (psyche) was one of purity (katharon), for it was not constricted by grief, nor relaxed by pleasure, nor affected by either laughter or dejection.… He maintained utter equilibrium, like one guided by reason (hypo tou logou) and steadfast in that with accords with nature (en to kata physin).”

  79.    VMO, prologue, 8.

  80.    Bynum, Holy Feast Holy Fast, 260–76; Caroline Walker Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 181–238; Vauchez, Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages, 433–43; Rudolph Bell and Donald Weinstein, Saints and Society: The Two Worlds of Western Christendom, 1000–1700 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 123–27, 153–57, 236–37.

  81.    See the work of Amy Hollywood for extensive discussion of this hagiographical practice, including The Soul as Virgin Wife: Mechthild of Magdebug, Marguerite Porete, and Meister Eckhart (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995), 26–39; Hollywood, Sensible Ecstasy: Mysticism, Sexual Difference, and the Demands of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 241–53.

  82.    Dyan Elliott, Proving Woman: Female Spirituality and Inquisitional Culture in the Later Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press), 2.

  83.    VMO, prologue, 1.

  84.    VMO, prologue, 6, 7, 8.

  85.    VMO, prologue, 9; Carolyn Muessig, The Faces of Women in the Sermons of Jacques de Vitry (Toronto: Peregrina, 1999), 42.

  86.    Female mendicancy inspired profound concern and was a major cause for distrust of Beguines, which is why Marie’s friends encouraged her to refrain from it (VMO, 2.45). That Thomas depicts Christina begging in no fewer than four chapters (chaps. 22–25) is further evidence of his flagrant courting of suspicion. Furthermore, although theological justification is given for her activities, carried out as a form of substitutionary atonement and in order to give others an opportunity to do good works by giving to her, Thomas also writes that she would take things that were refused to her without offering explanation. As Jennifer Brown asks, If this criminality is an exemplum, then how is it to be read? Brown, Three Women of Liège: A Critical Edition of and Commentary on the Middle English Lives of Elizabeth of Spalbeek, Christina Mirabilis and Marie d’Oignies (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008), 238. A similar ambivalence underlies Thomas’s presentation of Christina hearing Count Louis’s confession (VCM, 44). Although he is eager to point out that she does not offer absolution, for she has no such right, the text does not say that he received any other last rites. In hearing his final confession, Christina performs what was the official prerogative of priests and, furthermore, does, in some sense, “absolve” Louis of half of his sins through her bodily torment (VCM, 45). While commentators have argued that this passage distresses Thomas, it seems to me that he could have massaged the tale far more than he has (or left it out entirely) in order to mitigate Christina’s centrality in the death scene. As things stand, she is represented in a tableau, with Louis draped at her feet recounting his sins from his eleventh year to the present. He then disposes of his goods according to Christina’s advice. Thomas’s presentation of priests is ambivalent in general in this vita. While he has Christina proclaim her devotion to the clergy (VCM, 40), he also notes that they persecuted her “often,” misrecognizing her sanctity. On the whole, Christina performs their office more efficaciously than they do, counseling (VCM, 29, 30, 41), preaching sublimely (VCM, 27, 28, 29, 40), offering not the Eucharist but her own body as substitution, and hearing the confession of a great sinner. As Barbara Newman notes, and as my argument attempts to show, Thomas is primarily invested in demonstrating the novelty and even unintelligibility of Christina, and he does this through such controversial representations, some of which remain un- or undertheologized and thus unintelligible. See Newman, “Possessed by the Spirit,” 765.

  87.    For an account of late-medieval understandings of rapture see Dyan Elliott, “The Physiology of Rapture,” in Medieval Theology and the Natural Body, ed. P. Biller and A. Minnis (Rochester, NY: York Medieval, 1997). Bernard McGinn notes that while earlier monastic literature, including that of authorities such as Gregory the Great and Bernard of Clairvaux, stresses the inability of the body to sustain states of alienation from the senses in an encounter with God for long periods of time, The Life of Marie describes Beguinal women remaining enraptured, sometimes for days on end. Bernard McGinn, The Flowering of Mysticism: Men and Women in the New Mysticism (1200–1350), The Presence of God: A History of Western Christian Mysticism 3 (New York: Crossroad, 1998), 38.

  88.    VMO, prologue, 10.

  89.    VLA, 1.5.

  90.    Simons, “Reading a Saint’s Body,” 14. See Ambrose of Milan, De Officiis 1.108, Patrologiae cursus completus, Series Latina (Patrologia Latina), vol. 16, ed. J. P. Migne (Paris, 1845), col. 16.

  91.    Thomas of Cantimpré, Vita Margarete de Ypres, in “Les Frères Prêcheurs et le mouvement dévoten Flandreaux aux XIIIe siècle,” ed. Gilles Meersseman, Archivum Fratrum Praedicatorum 18 (1948): 106–30, 12; henceforth VMY in the notes. VMY, 12.

  92.    Simons, 19.

  93.    Thus, Lutgard is given various observable physical graces, such as being suspended in the air (VLA, 1.10) and having the sun descend upon her in the night (VLA, 1.11), in order to prove her unique status to her fellow nuns. The literal cracking, breaking apart, and burning up of Beatrice of Nazareth’s body is presented as an apt “translation” of her interior spiritual life by her hagiographer. Cf. Beatrice’s treatise, “There Are Seven Manners of Loving,” trans. Eric Colledge, in Medieval Women’s Visionary Literature, ed. Elizabeth A. Petroff (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 203; Life of Beatrice of Nazareth, trans. Roger DeGanck (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian, 1991), 308–11. Elizabeth of Spalbeek enacts horrifying representations of the passion, becoming, as the Middle English translator has it, “booth the persone of Criste suffrynge and the persone of the enmye turmentynge,” but this performance is observed with no attempted intervention by fascinated clerics. See Jennifer Brown, “The Middle English Life of Elizabeth of Spalbeek,” in Three Women of Liège, 105.

  94.    VCM, 21.

  95.    VCM, 26.

  96.    VCM, 37.

  97.    VCM, 26.

  98.    See, for example, Ambrose of Milan, On Virgins 1.8.53–10.57; Tertullian, On the Veiling of Virgins 16.4–17.5.

  99.    VCM, 46. “Cum reverteretur, nemo eam salutare, nemo aliquid interrogare audebat. Vespere enim aliquando revertens transibat per mediam domum quasi spiritus super terram: vixque discerni poterat si spiritus transibat aut corpus, cum terram vix tangere videretur. Adeo enim in illo extremo vitæ suæ anno in omnibus fere partibus animale corpus sic spiritus obtinuerat, ut humanæ mentes vel oculi vix possent ejus corporis umbram sine horrore & tremore spiritus intueri.”

100.    Christina is not limited to the bodily sphere by Thomas, and her preaching is often verbal, such as when she tells townspeople about purgatory (VCM, 28), reproaches the unrepentant (VCM, 37), speaks “with wondrous grace of speech” in front of the knights of Count Louis, and acts as confessor to the same count (VCM, 44). However, these deeds are themselves ambivalent and do not serve to make her strange body less transgressive or necessarily intelligible as a holy rather than a demonic force. As Sweetman argues (“Christine of Saint-Trond’s Preaching Apostolate,” 68), such verbal preaching by a woman outside the confines of the cloister was a violation of canon law. Furthermore, Jennifer Brown and Anneke Mulder-Bakker note Thomas’s ambivalent representation of Christina hearing Count Louis’s confession (see Brown, Three Women, 240). While Christina hears his full confession on his deathbed and at other times would “obtain from him whatever was owing for the satisfaction of justice” (VCM, 41)—a function uncomfortably close to assigning penance for post–Lateran IV sensibilities—Thomas clarifies that she understood that she did not inhabit a priestly role and did not offer an absolution that “she had no power to give.” However, as I argue above, the ambivalence of the story occurs because Thomas’s depiction flirts with her giving exactly what she had no power to give.

101.    VCM, 5.

102.    VCM, 14.

103.    VCM, 10, 21, 22, 24.

104.    VCM, 9.

105.    Newman, “Possessed by the Spirit,” 764.

106.    Newman, 764.

107.    Williams, Deformed Discourse, 3.

108.    On the connection between temporal deformity and ontological deformity, Williams notes the work of Geoffrey Galt Harpham, who argues that the creation of the grotesque occurs by attaching in one moment the different phases of a creature’s being, “with the intervening temporal gap so great that is appears that species boundaries, and not mere time, has been overlapped.” Geoffrey Galt Harpham, On the Grotesque: Strategies of Contradiction in Art and Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), 11, quoted in Williams, Deformed Discourse, 5. Once resurrected, Christina’s body is a realized eschatology, attaching the flesh of earthly life to the qualities of the afterlife, even as her terrifying practices open the door between this world and the next, unveiling the future in the present, a future caused by the sins and virtues of the past.

109.    Hosea 1:2–9.

110.    On her lamentation, VCM, 13, 26, 37, 45, 50; on her enactment of purgatorial pain, VCM, 7.

111.    VCM, 45. On the “apostolate to the dead” of female saints and the theological underpinnings of substitution, see Newman, “On the Threshold of the Dead,” in From Virile Woman to WomanChrist, 108–36.

112.    VCM, 25.

113.    VCM, 28.

114.    VCM, 24.

115.    VCM, 26.

116.     VCM, 36.

117.    VCM, 10.

118.    VCM, 23.

119.    VCM, 6, 28.

120.    VCM, 5.

121.    VCM, 11, 20, 43.

122.    VCM, 46.

123.    VCM, 22.

124.    VCM, 27.

125.    VCM, 9, 10, 17, 19, 20.

126.    See Sweetman, “Christine of Saint-Trond’s Preaching Apostolate,” 68.

127.    Hollywood, “Breaking the Waves,” 24. See also Stephen G. Nichols’s discussion of Passion narratives and liturgical celebrations in which, he argues, the audience’s emotional response becomes evidence for divine “reality,” revealing God’s presence and power within the ritual actor or reader. Nichols, Romanesque Signs: Early Medieval Narrative and Iconography (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), 5.

128.    Hollywood, 8.

129.    God’s action upon Christina (both in terms of “driving” her deeds and in showing her his purgatorial realm) is often described with the verb cogere, which contains the sense of force acting upon someone or something. In using the verb to describe the necessary punishment God inflicts on sinners, Thomas implicitly suggests that God is the actor in a drama played out on the stage of necessity, who, in some sense, is not responsible for the tortures he inflicts but is merely obeying the dictates of a law that requires the careful balance of mercy and justice.

130.    VMY, 6.

131.    VMY, 7.

132.    VMY, 8.

133.    VMY, 16. “Frequentissime quidem accipiebat usque ad effusionem sanguinis disciplinas. Vix puer annorum trium vivere cibo posset, quo illa degens in carne vivebat, et tamen oportebat quod a circumsedente socia ad unamquamque fere bucellam, quasi cibi nescia, moveretur, et cum corriperetur a matre, cur non intenderet cibo, illa suspirans: ‘Multa, inquit, habeo cogitare, que me alias distrahunt.’ Sepe diebus duobus aut tribus continuabat ieiunia, quod non comedit. De potu vero fere continuum erat, quod non bibebat. A vino et carnis et cibis delicatis penitus abstinebat.”

134.    VMY, 17, 22, 24, 28.

135.    VMY, 18, 20, 28, 30, 44.

136.    VMY, 24, 31, 32, 35, 37, 39.

137.    VMY, 21.

138.    VMY, 17. “Tenella iuvencula evidentissimum signum invenio, quod corpus humanum, super id quod carnales credunt, sine detractione sui multa potest et magna, maxime vero ubi amor omnia tolerat.”

139.    VMY, 17.

140.    VMY, 19, 21, 26, 40.

141.    VMY, 17.

142.    VMY, 48.

143.    Elliott, “The Physiology of Rapture,” 154.

144.    Elliott, 164.

145.    VLA, 1.16.

146.    Margot H. King, “The Sacramental Witness of Christina Mirabilis: The Mystic Growth of a Fool for Christ’s Sake,” in Peaceweavers, ed. Lillian Shank et al. (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian, 1987), 158.

147.    King, 149

148.    Roisin, “La méthode hagiographique, 546–47.

149.    VLA, 1.21.

150.    VMY, 45.

151.    VLA, 2.23.

152.    See, for instance, James of Vitry’s Life of Marie of Oignies, where the distinction is invoked as a way of coping with the intense anxiety that some of Marie’s ascetic practices cause for him. He writes, “I do not say these things to commend the excess but so that I might show her fervor.… Necessary things are not to be taken from the poverty of the flesh, although vices are to be checked. Therefore, admire rather than imitate what we have read about the things certain saints have done through the familiar counsel of the Holy Spirit” (VMO, 2.12). James thus leaves the tricky issue of discernment for the reader, who must decide, “through the familiar counsel of the Holy Spirit,” what is to be imitated and what is to be admired.

153.    Edith Wyschogrod, Saints and Postmodernism: Revisioning Moral Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 13.

154.    VCM, 46.

155.    See Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast; John Coakley, Women, Men, and Spiritual Power: Female Saints and Their Male Collaborators (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006). In Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages, André Vauchez argues that women had only the “language of the body” at their disposal for the expression of their religious experience, and in the later Middle Ages, this discourse was increasingly inflected by the suffering body of Christ (438).

156.    Sweetman, “Dominican Preaching,” 135.

157.    Wyschogrod, Saints and Postmodernism, 13.

3. GENDERING PARTICULARITY

    1.    Thomas of Cantimpré, Vita Ioannis Cantimpratensis, in “Une oeuvre inédite de Thomas de Cantimpré, la ‘Vita Ioannis Cantimpratensis,’ ” ed. Robert Godding, Revue d’histoire ecclésiastique 76 (1981): 257–316; English translation, Thomas of Cantimpré, The Life of Abbot John of Cantimpré, in Thomas of Cantimpré: The Collected Saints’ Lives, ed. Barbara Newman, trans. Barbara Newman and Margot H. King (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008), 57–124. Hereafter VJC in the notes.

    2.    Thomas wrote John’s Life from 1223 to 1228 and Christina’s in 1232.

    3.    Cf. VJC, 2.9.

    4.    VJC, 2.8b. “At quoniam propositi nostri narrationem, licet congrue et utiliter, longe ualde excessimus, ad id tamen ad quod singulariter stilum intendimus reuertamur.”

    5.    Barbara Newman, introduction to Thomas of Cantimpré: The Collected Saints’ Lives, 23.

    6.    VJC, 2.5. “Per omnia et in omnibus sancti patris micant insignia.”

    7.    VJC, 2.8b. “Ipsum ad tam sublimem perfectionis gradum exortatione sedula perduxisse ut, restitutis rebus et copiis que per uim a se subiectis extorserat, per omnem pene Galliam atque Germaniam humilitatis ac sanctitatis illius odor celebris spargeretur.”

    8.    Newman, introduction, 23. See VJC, 2.1.

    9.    VJC, 2.8b. “De hoc, illud insigne admirationis refertur piaculum quod, leprosum horrenda facie fedum, sanie per ora scatentem suppliciter osculatus, propria exutus ueste contexerit.”

  10.    VJC, 2.3.

  11.    VJC, 1.15–16.

  12.    VJC, 2.6.

  13.    VJC, 2.6. “Sed quia nichil opertum quod non reueletur, neque absconditum quod non sciatur.” Cf. Thomas of Cantimpré, Bonum universale des apibus, ed. Georges Colvener (Duaci: Baltazaris Belleri, 1627), 1.24.3; 2.27.2; Luke 12:2.

  14.    VJC, 1.10. “Mirum per omnia pulchrum spectaculum, sed non aliud uel alius quam qui sub nube panis cotidie uelabatur. Hec uidens horrore prosternitur, peractoque misterio salutari, pedibus sancti sacerdotis aduoluitur.”

  15.    Robert Sweetman, “Christine of Saint-Trond’s Preaching Apostolate: Thomas of Cantimpré’s Hagiographical Method Revisited,” Vox Benedictina 9, no. 1 (July 1992): 68.

  16.    VJC, 2.9. “Si enim Christus in debellatione seculi uti sua eterna potentia uoluisset, non utique homines sine literis et ydiotas, ut Lucas in eorum actibus testatur, sed milia milium, duodecies centena milia angelorum sibi in auxilium exhibita delegisset. Sed regnum eius non est hinc, quia ministrare uenerat et non ministrari, et infirma mundi elegit ut confunderet fortia et abiecta potius et comtemptibilia, ut ea que errant, tamquam non essent euacuaret.”

  17.    VJC, 2.11. “Cuius stupore et extasi omnes in subitatione peruasi, pilis carnis quasi quibusdam hisutiis inhorruerunt. Nec mora, diuinus horror in animas transfusus, interius uirtutem eterne salutis per compunctionem operatur in pluribus.”

  18.    VJC, 1.10.

  19.    VJC, 2.13.

  20.    VJC, 2.9. “His dictis, uehementi in se animaduersione conuersus sanctitatem uiri et facetitiam mirabatur, cepitque eum intimo affectu cordis excolere eiusque uerbis et admonitionibus inherere.”

  21.    VJC, 2.13.

  22.    VJC, 2.12. “ ‘Quis filios meos pauperes pro Christo effectos et nudos cooperiet?’ Ad hanc uocem, uideres nobiles et insignes uestibus se certatim exuere, tunicas et pallia iactantium uiolentia ferri per aera, uestiri ac cumulari nudos, altisonis uocibus populum conclamare.” As Barbara Newman notes, John’s vita bears astonishing similarities to Francis’s, and the VJC was completed the year of Francis’s canonization and the appearance of Thomas of Celano’s vita prima; Newman, introduction, 6. This similarity has to do with the urbanization, mercantile wealth, and concomitant disparities between rich and poor that arose, leading to movements protesting poverty, inspired by the vita apostolica, which were common to the contexts of both figures. Newman, 11.

  23.    For a close analysis of this language and tradition, which she traces back to Anselm of Canterbury, see Caroline Walker Bynum, “Jesus as Mother, Abbott as Mother: Some Themes in Twelfth-Century Cistercian Writing,” in Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 110–66.

  24.    VJC, 1.3.

  25.    VLA 1.3, 3.17; VJC, 1.14.

  26.    VJC, 2.1.

  27.    VJC, 2.22.

  28.    See, for instance, VLA, 3.9.

  29.    VJC, 2.22. “Sed ab una parte sollicitudine proximorum in quibus scandala crebrescebant, ex altera uero desiderio uidendi eum quem memoriter retinebat, instantius angebatur. Inter hec duo, spe quodammodo metuque suspensus, spiritalis martirii agone, ut hinc expectationis eculeo sublimatus, illinc scandalorum ignibus ureretur. Sic corpus foris, sic spiritum affligebat interius. Corporalis martirii iam tempus abierat, restabat solius uoluntatis spiritalis afflictio.”

  30.    VJC, 2.24.

  31.    VJC, 2.24. Bynum, “Jesus as Mother,” 115. She notes that Bernard, in particular, uses the image of the abbot as a mother who suckles, pouring out affectivity and instruction, unable to turn away from her child. The abbot is not only bride but mother, one who must do more than lie with the groom but must busily raise her needy children, i.e., preach, counsel, and perform administrative tasks.

  32.    André Vauchez, Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages, trans. Jean Birrell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 437–38.

  33.    VJC, 2.9. “Erga uero plebeias multitudines, adeo sanctus et extra humanum modum mirabilis apparebat, ut apostolica quedam in eo dignitas reflorescere uideretur. Predicaturus enim in populo statim, ubi ascenso pulpito seu exedra primam in themate sermonis uocem dabat, omnes pene in lachrimis resoluti compungebantur.”

  34.    Vauchez, Sainthood, 435. See Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, trans. A. C. Pegis (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1987), 4.86.

  35.    VJC, 2.9.

4. A QUESTION OF PROOF

    1.    Thomas of Cantimpré, Vita Mariae Oigniacensis, Supplementum, ed. Arnold Raysse, Acta Sanctorum V (June 23): 572–81; English translation, Thomas of Cantimpré, The Supplement to the Life of Mary of Oignies, trans. Hugh Feiss, in Mary of Oignies, Mother of Salvation, ed. Anneke B. Mulder-Bakker (Turnhout: Brepols, 2006), chap. 16. Henceforth VMO-S in the notes. “Ingressus Scripturarum misericordiæque divinæ thesauros, prædicabat (sed non ignaro talium) ea quæ in hujusmodi tentationibus apta & congrua esse videbantur.” Extended Latin passages will be provided in the notes with column numbers from the Acta Sanctorum.

    2.    VMO-S, 16.

    3.    VMO-S, 20.

    4.    VMO-S, 17.

    5.    VMO-S, 16. “Sed quoniam ipse Acconensis, vir prudens & expertus, in talibus fieri sæpe sciebat, ut mens talium maxime tentationum fluctibus obruta, subito rationem non capiat, nisi exemplis evidentissimis confirmetur.”

    6.    Dyan Elliott, Proving Woman: Female Spirituality and Inquisitional Culture in the Later Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 2.

    7.    Elliott, chap. 2.

    8.    Elliott, 47–48.

    9.    Charlton T. Lewis, A Latin Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984), “probo,” 1449.

  10.    Wendy Olmstead, Rhetoric: An Historical Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 13. See also Hannah Arendt’s discussion in The Human Condition, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 89–102. Thomas’s access to Aristotle’s Rhetoric is uncertain. Hermannus Allemanus translated a gloss on the Rhetoric from Arabic in 1240. The oldest translation of the Rhetoric from Greek was completed before 1250 but was, James J. Murphy notes, never used in the schools and survives in only three manuscripts. William of Moerbeke’s translation, commissioned by Thomas Aquinas and completed ca. 1270, was obviously too late to have been used by Thomas of Cantimpré. James J. Murphy, Rhetoric in the Middle Ages: A History of Rhetorical Theory from Saint Augustine to the Renaissance (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2001), 91–94. The point of mentioning Aristotle here, however, is not to make a case for what of Aristotelian rhetorical theory Thomas may or may not have had access to but simply to contrast Augustine’s rhetorical theory with Aristotle’s.

  11.    Aristotle, The “Art” of Rhetoric, trans. John Henry Freese (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1926), 2.20.1394a (p. 279). If, on the other hand, there is no syllogism to draw upon, Aristotle argues that a rhetor must employ many examples as demonstrative proofs, for conviction is produced by these; “but if we have them, examples must be used as evidence and as a kind of epilogue to the enthymemes” (2.20.1394a). James’s extensive list of the holy women of Liège in the prologue to the Life of Marie of Oignies is an instance of this second use of examples. The multiplicity of figures described leads the reader to conclude that something important and strange is afoot in Liège. According to Aristotle, this type of argument is weaker than one in which examples are used to illustrate an abstract argument.

  12.    Olmstead, Rhetoric, 35. For example, Augustine writes, “in this grand style of eloquence which can be done to move (ad commovendos) the minds of listeners, the purpose being not to make known to them what they must do, but to make them do what they already know (sciunt) must be done.” Augustine, On Christian Teaching, trans. and ed. R. P. H. Greene (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2008), 4.75. Latin from Augustine, De Doctrina Christiana, Corpus Christianorum (Series Latina) 32, ed. Joseph Martin (Turnhout: Brepols, 1996), IV.12.27. Henceforth DDC in the notes. Augustine is building upon Cicero’s argument that eloquence ideally instructs (doceat), delights (delectet), and moves (flectat) listeners (IV.12.27). Augustine quotes Cicero that to move the audience is a “matter of conquest” (flectere victoriae) and elaborates that a hearer is moved if “he values what you promise, fears what you threaten, hates what you condemn, embraces what you commend, and rues the thing which you insist that he must regret” (IV.12.27).

  13.    Augustine, Confessions 8.29. See Virginia Burrus, Mark D. Jordan, and Karmen MacKendrick, “The Word, His Body,” in Seducing Augustine: Bodies, Confessions, Desires, ed. Virginia Burrus et al. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), which discusses Augustine’s “dissolution into texts”: “Augustine’s own body is overwritten by a Pauline verse about Jesus’ body” (53). Here, however, the author argues that the literal presence of Jesus’s incarnate body recedes under the pressure of Augustine’s ambivalence about figuration. Augustine does not encounter a vision of Jesus but reads a Pauline commandment to live chastely. What Augustine’s body “puts on,” according to this reading, would be very different from Hugolino’s act of taking up Marie’s relic and vita. For a persuasive counterargument to this understanding of Augustine’s conversion, see James Wetzel, “Life in Unlikeness: The Materiality of Augustine’s Conversion,” Journal of Religion 91, no. 1 (Jan. 2011): 43–63.

  14.    The language of presence recalls Peter Brown’s argument in The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), that from its inception, the relic cult “gloried in particularity,” making the sacred present on earth in physical form, thereby bringing “a sense of deliverance and pardon into the present” (92). Enshrined relics offered holy presence in tangible form in specific locations, marking and differentiating geographical loci (86), while those who possessed relics—a form of portable presence—could share them and thus their gracious power with others. Brown argues that such “gestures of concord” solidified networks of sociality and patronage (90), as occurs in Thomas’s high-medieval story between James and Hugolino, who enjoyed an extensive alliance.

  15.    Steven Justice, “Did the Middle Ages Believe in Their Miracles?” Representations 103 (Summer 2008): 1.

  16.    Aristotle’s notion of the rhetorical syllogism or enthymeme (from enthumesthai, meaning “to take heart,” “to conclude,” or “to infer”) draws near to Augustinian formulations on this score in the sense that he understood a good rhetorical argument to be one that enters the thumos, the heart. See Olmstead, Rhetoric, 13.

  17.    The rich conceptual field of the notion of “proof” was present very early in Christian monasticism. For example, Cassian writes that a monk fully imbued with the language and affect of the psalmist from a practice of constant recitation is able to anticipate the psalmist’s words, becoming, in effect, the author of the Psalm, so that “the meanings of the words are disclosed to us not by exegesis but by proof” (documenta). John Cassian, The Conferences, trans. Boniface Ramsey (New York: Paulist Press, 1997), 10.11.5, p. 384. Documentum contains the sense not only of proof as in a specimen but, as its derivation from doceo suggests, may mean an example that teaches by offering a pattern for imitation or warning. Documentum and probatus/probo share the sense of demonstrating or showing the truth of something, but probatus carries a greater connotation of judgment, not only in the juridical context, where it is the term for what has been offered as proof in a trial, but more generically, it tends to indicate that which has been tried, tested (often by the fires of experience), and is thus approved, esteemed, or recommended. Lewis, A Latin Dictionary, “documentum.”

  18.    On this role for hagiography, see James Howard-Johnston, ed., The Cult of Saints in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages: Essays on the Contribution of Peter Brown (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 7; Barbara Newman, introduction to Thomas of Cantimpré: The Collected Saints’ Lives, ed. Barbara Newman, trans. Barbara Newman and Margot H. King (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008), 18.

  19.    Alfred Deboutte, De Heilige Lutgart (Tentoonstelling uitgave van de Gilde van Sint Lutgard, 1963), 19–29. Manuscript 8609–20 of the Koninklijke Bibliotheek in Brussels contains the Lives of Lutgard, Christina, Mary Magdalene, Elisabeth of Hungary, Alice the Leper, Ida of Nivelles, Margaret the Lame, and Elisabeth of Schönau; the De gloriosis sodalibus sanctae Ursulae; and excerpts from Sermo de XII fructibus sacramenti by Guyard van Laon. The manuscript was owned by La Cambre Abbey, a Cistercian monastery. A second manuscript (4450–70 from the Koninklijke Bibliotheek in Brussels) was commissioned in 1320 by Jan van Sint-Truiden, a Cistercian monk from Villers and confessor of women at Vrouwenpark te Rotselaer. It likewise contained the Lives of Christina and Lutgard as well as those of Cistercian nuns Beatrice of Nazareth and Alice the Leper, anchorite Margaret the Lame, and Franciscan tertiary Elizabeth of Hungary. A manuscript from 1300 containing Thomas’s Latin Life of Lutgard and a rhyming adaptation in Middle Dutch attributed to the Benedictine monk Willem van Affligem was owned by his monastery at Saint Truiden and went to the Rooklooster Priory of Regular Canons in 1368. This manuscript history shows that the Lives of the astonishing laywoman Christina, Cistercian nuns, and women of other vocations were read together, and had great interest for monks of multiple orders. The question of how a reader could understand a saint’s life to be adoptable and adaptable to his or her own existence would perhaps be even more difficult for male monastic readers of the vita. If we take Thomas at his word, the text was intended for nuns, but the circulation of the Life in male monastic houses is clearly attested to by the historical record. For a recent study of the thirteenth-century Lives of the mulieres religiosae from Liège that considers the way in which the manuscripts’ signification is necessarily bound up with the “reading events” in which they were encountered, the event being a tripartite structure composed of the reader or auditor, the text proper, and the space in which the reading occurred, see Sara Ritchey, “Saints Lives as Efficacious Texts: Cistercian Monks, Religious Women, and Curative Reading, c. 1250–1330,” Speculum 92, no. 4 (October 2017): 1101–43. Ritchey finds in these reading events much of what I find in the textual content of Thomas’s works, namely a sense of these Lives as transformative documents, the reading of which was a “therapeutic process” meant to heal body and mind.

  20.    Newman, introduction, 18. The vernacular translation of Lutgard’s Life into Middle Dutch verse fewer than thirty years later indicates that the vita did indeed have a much broader appeal. There are two rhyming versions in Middle Dutch. The first, attributed to Willem van Affligem, was meant to be sung by minstrels. It is quite free with Thomas’s version. The second is attributed to a Franciscan named Geraert. See Erwin Mantingh, Een monnik met een rol: Willem van Affligem, het Kopenhaagse Leven van Lutgart en de fictie van een meerdaagse voorlezing (Hilversum: Verloren, 2000); Simone Roisin, L’hagiographie Cistercienne dans le diocèse de Liège au XIIIe siècle (Louvain: Bibliothèque de l’Université, 1947), 52–53n8.

  21.    Robert Sweetman, “Dominican Preaching in the Southern Low Countries 1240–1260: Materia Praedicabiles in the Liber de natura rerum and Bonum universale de apibus of Thomas of Cantimpré” (PhD diss., University of Toronto, 1988), 245–46. Sweetman notes that this view was common in Dominican sources and explains the increasing assimilation of traditionally monastic practices by devout laity beginning in the thirteenth century.

  22.    Thomas of Cantimpré, Vita Lutgardis Aquiriensis, ed. Godfrey Henschen, Acta Sanctorum III (June 16): 187–209; English translation, Thomas of Cantimpré, The Life of Lutgard of Aywières, in Thomas of Cantimpré: The Collected Saints’ Lives, 211–96. Henceforth VLA in the notes. Thomas of Cantimpré, Vita Margarete de Ypres, in “Les Frères Prêcheurs et le Mouvement Dévot en Flandres aux XIIIe siècle,” ed. Gilles Meersseman, Archivum Fratrum Praedicatorum 18 (1948): 106–30. Henceforth VMY in the notes. VLA, 1.2, 1.3, 1.12, 3.7; VMY, 1, 7, 10.

  23.    Royal Library of Belgium, MS 8609-20, produced for Cistercian women at La Cambre by the Cistercian community at Villers (detailed in note 19) demonstrates the use of lay models in literature created for professed women. See Ritchey, “Saints’ Lives as Efficacious Texts,” 1101–43, for a close study of this MS.

  24.    “Nec credo vitam alicujus, quae tot virtutum insignia & mirabilium ac miraculorum praerogativas in se contineat, a multis retroactis annis fuisse descriptam. Si autem quaeritis, quomodo legentibus fidem faciam de iis omnibus, quae conscripsi: breviter dico, quod ipse Christus testis & judex sit, quod plurima ex iis ab ore ipsius piae Lutgardis, sicut familiarissimus ejus, accepi: & in iis nullum ita temerarium credo, qui ejus testimoniis contradicat: caetera vero a talibus me percepisse profiteor, qui nequaquam a veritatis tramite deviarent. Pleraque etiam, & revera magnifica, scribere non consensi; vel quia non intelligibilia rudibus essent, vel quia testimonium conveniens non inveni.” Col. 0234C–D.

  25.    VLA, 2.21. “She began in a wondrous and ineffable way to desire to endure martyrdom for Christ like the most blessed Agnes. As she burned with such great longing that she expected to die from desire alone, one of the outer veins opposite her heart burst, and so much blood flowed from it that her tunics and cowl were copiously drenched … and at once Christ appeared to her with a joyful countenance and said, ‘For the most fervent yearning for martyrdom that you experienced in shedding this blood, you will receive in heaven the same reward that St Agnes earned when she was beheaded for her faith. By your desire you have equaled her martyrdom in blood.’ ”

  26.    Roisin, L’hagiographie Cistercienne, 56. Goswin writes, “I have undertaken to write the Life of Christ’s virgin, Ida, undistinguished though I am by any oratorical fluency and unaware of any imaginative subtlety adequately equipping me to couch it in fitting words. What largely excuses me is an order from my abbot, obliging me to set out the Life in a fairly simple style. In doing this, I have relied, not only my own limited imagination, but on that almighty Lord who opens the dumb mouth and makes infant tongues fluent of speech (Wisd. 10.21). Little wonder that my mind trembles to begin a task it can scarcely carry through, especially in that the admirable conversatio of this blessed one involves a saintly affectivity difficult to describe and those many kinds of luminous contemplations graciously lavished on her by her Bridegroom.” The topos continues for three lengthy paragraphs. Goswin of Bossut, The Life of Ida of Nivelles, in Send Me God: The Lives of Ida the Compassionate of Nivelles, Nun of La Ramée, Arnulf, Lay Brother of Villers, and Abundus, Monk of Villers, trans. Martinus Cawley (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003), prologue, b, c, p. 29.

  27.    Parallels like this lead Roisin to attribute Goswin with influence upon Thomas’s writing of the VLA. See Roisin, L’hagiographie Cistercienne, 222.

  28.    I am here breaking with Simone Roisin’s account of the deep interest in the marvelous among Cistercian hagiographers in Liège. Roisin argues that they had a “naïve and perpetual amazement” that “spontaneously” arose in the face of their subjects (Roisin, 260). This view is odd given the rhetorical and literary sophistication that Roisin finds in the vitae and her argument that the language of the Lives is an attempt to reveal the inability of language to “catch a glimpse of the divine” (212). Thomas’s explicit concern about the credibility of this text, a concern that is repeated in the Life of Christina the Astonishing, demonstrates that the eruptions of marvelousness depicted by the vitae are not a result of Thomas’s naïveté but rather are a saintly effect that places him in a particular and often awkward position as hagiographer.

  29.    VLA 1.12. Thomas’s sense of an apocalyptic shift occurring in Liège is apparent in his first hagiography, Thomas of Cantimpré, Vita Ioannis Cantimpratensis, in “Une oeuvre inédite de Thomas de Cantimpre: la ‘Vita Ioannis Cantimpratensis,’ ” ed. Robert Godding, Revue d’histoire Ecclesiastique 76 (1981): 241–316; English translation, Thomas of Cantimpré, The Life of Abbot John of Cantimpré, in Thomas of Cantimpré: The Collected Saints’ Lives, 57–124. He writes that John had arisen as “a new daystar amid the shadows of twilight” as “the present world draws near to its setting” (1.1). In this work, the secular world is represented as filled with heresy, which John is sent to counter.

  30.    VLA, 1.17.

  31.    On wonders that Lutgard experienced, see VLA, 1.13, 1.15, 1.16; on wonders that others witnessed, see VLA, 1.19, 2.2.

  32.    VLA, 1.10.

  33.    VLA, 1.11.

  34.    VLA, 1.13.

  35.    VLA, 1.17.

  36.    VLA, 1.19.

  37.    VLA, 1.8, 1.17.

  38.    VLA, 1.20.

  39.    VLA, prologue. “Non solum vos, sed omnium monasteriorum Brabantiae coetus virginum, Vitam piae Lutgardis suscipiant; ut quae in fama virtutis notissima omnibus fuit, ipsa brevi libelli hujus insinuatione plenius innotescat; augeatque legentibus virtutem & meritum, quibus praescriptum aderit virtutis exemplu.”

  40.    The text explicitly models this suspicion early in the Life when she escaped an attempted rape by one of her suitors, and yet “the innocent girl [became] an object of suspicion” (in suspicionem innocens puella devenit) among the townspeople who did not believe that she had fended off his attack (VLA, 1.5).

  41.    André Vauchez, Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages, trans. Jean Birrell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 140.

  42.    VLA, prologue. “Officium personae & Ordinis; & si non nomen proprium, in salutatione posui; ut scilicet autoritas in Officio & Ordine commendetur; nec tamen opus sequens nominis insinuatione vilescat.” Interestingly, the contemporary Life of Ida of Nivelles, which Simone Roisin argues was a vital influence on Thomas, also contains an extensive humility topos in its prologue but does not, unlike Thomas, include the personal name, remaining anonymous. L’hagiographie Cistercienne, 56.

  43.    VLA, prologue. “Sicut me non solum vestra, immo multorum monasteriorum caritas & amor, quem specialissimum erga personam habebam flagrantissimus incitavit.”

  44.    Though Augustine treated caritas, amor, and dilectio interchangeably, particularly in his homilies, early Christian writers generally did not use amor or amare because of their connotation of passionate physical love. Amor and amare do not appear in the Vulgate, and in other Latin translations when these terms were used, they never referred to “brotherly love” in “the religious sense.” Thomas was an avid reader of Augustine, but his use of amor in this context would still have carried the force of its difference from the caritas he applied to his relation with Hadewijch and the monasteries of the Brabant. See translator John W. Rettig’s commentary on Augustine’s Tractates on the Gospel of John 112–24 (Washington, DC: Catholic University Press, 1995), 115–16.

  45.    VLA, prologue. “Bonorum enim ingeniorum, ut dicit gloriosissimus Augustinus, insignis est indoles, in verbis verum amare, non verba. Neque enim aurum minus pretiosum est, quod de terra tollitur; neque vinum minus sapidum, quod de vilibus lignis excipitur.”

  46.    DDC, preface, 1.

  47.    DDC, preface, 18.

  48.    DDC, preface, 8, 11.

  49.    DDC, preface, 11, 13.

  50.    DDC, preface, 13.

  51.    DDC, 1.85.

  52.    DDC, 2.41, 2.43.

  53.    Rita Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 158. See also Geoffrey Galt Harpham, “The Fertile Word: Augustine’s Ascetics of Interpretation,” Criticism 28, no. 3 (Summer 1986): 243; James J. Murphy, who argues that the “metarhetoric” underlying book 4 of the DDC—as well as De magistro (389) and De catechizandis rudibus (399)—places “great stress upon individual judgment” and holds that “rhetors do not persuade, but that hearers move themselves; that teachers do not teach, but instead that learners learn.” Murphy, Rhetoric in the Middle Ages, 289.

  54.    DDC, 1.1.

  55.    DDC, 3.78; R. P. H. Green, introduction to On Christian Teaching, x–xi.

  56.    Green, xii.

  57.    David Tracy, “Charity, Obscurity, Clarity,” in The Rhetoric of Saint Augustine of Hippo: “De Doctrina” Christiana and the Search for a Distinctly Christian Rhetoric, ed. Richard Leo Enos et al. (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2008), 272.

  58.    Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation, 155.

  59.    Humbert of Romans, for example, quotes book 4 of the DDC multiple times in his Treatise on Preaching, ed. Walter M. Conlon, trans. Dominican Students (London: Newman Press, 1951). An earlier example of the popularity of Augustine’s treatise is Rabanus Maurus’s ninth-century treatise, De institutione clericorum (important for Augustine’s medieval influence), which summarizes the DDC and quotes extensively from Augustine’s text. See Murphy, Rhetoric in the Middle Ages, chap. 2. The first (known) printing of the DDC (Strasbourg, 1463) only published book 4, which seems to be in keeping with the medieval tradition. See T. Sullivan, S. Aurelii Augustinin Hipponiensis Episcopi de Doctrina Christiana Liber Quartus: A Commentary, with a Revised Text, Introduction and Translation, Catholic University of America Patristic Series 23 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1930), ix. Citation from Sweetman, “Dominican Preaching,” 147n25. Demonstrating that his knowledge of the DDC extended beyond book 4 is the fact that Thomas appeals to Augustine in his earlier work, De natura rerum, where he writes in the prologue and book 19 that his treatise answers Augustine’s call in book 2 of DDC for the classification and description of plants, stones, and other natural things in scripture for exegetical purposes. Thomas of Cantimpré, Liber de natura rerum von Thomas Cantimpratensis, ed. H. Boese (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1973), 19.7.8–12, 414. See Sweetman, “Dominican Preaching,” 86–95.

  60.    R. A. Markus, “St. Augustine on Signs,” Phronesis 2, no. 1 (1957): 71.

  61.    DDC, 1.4.

  62.    DDC, 2.1.

  63.    DDC, 1.4.

  64.    DDC, 1.4.

  65.    DDC, 1.39.

  66.    DDC, 1.39.

  67.    DDC, 1.8.

  68.    DDC, 1.10.

  69.    DDC, 1.9.

  70.    DDC, 1.75, 1.80.

  71.    DDC, 2.2.

  72.    DDC, 2.3.

  73.    DDC, 2.4–5.

  74.    DDC, 2.32–34.

  75.    1 Cor. 1:21; DDC, 1.25.

  76.    DDC, 1.13–14.

  77.    DDC, 1.37.

  78.    DDC, 4.29.

  79.    DDC, 4.26; IV.6.9. “Ipsis enim congruit; alios autem quanto videtur humilior tanto altius non ventositate sed soliditate transcendit.”

  80.    Eric Auerbach, Literary Latin and Its Public in Late Antiquity and in the Middle Ages (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1965), 22.

  81.    Auerbach, 41.

  82.    DDC, 4.25.

  83.    DDC, 4.25.

  84.    DDC, 4.27.

  85.    DDC, 2.18–21.

  86.    Tracy, “Charity, Obscurity, Clarity,” 283.

  87.    DDC, 4.72–73; IV.11.26. “Prorsus haec est in docendo eloquentia, qua fit dicendo non ut libeat quod horrebat aut ut fiat quod pigebat sed ut appareat quod latebat. Quod tamen si fiat insuaviter, ad paucos quidem studioissimos suus pervenit fructus, qui ea quae discenda sunt, quamvis abiecte inculteque dicantur, scire desiderant. Quod cum adepti fuerint, ipsa delectabiliter veritate pascuntur, bonorum ingeniorum insignis est indoles in verbis verum amare, non verba. Quid enim prodest clavis aurea, si aperire quod volumus non potest, aut quid obest lignea, si hoc potest, quando nihil quaerimus nisi patere quod clausum est?”

  88.    DDC, 4.45.

  89.    Cf. DDC, 4.26–27.

  90.    Allison Frazier, Possible Lives: Authors and Saints in Renaissance Italy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005).

  91.    Tracy, “Charity, Obscurity, Clarity,” 276.

  92.    DDC, 4.15; Debora K. Shuger, Sacred Rhetoric: The Christian Grand Style in the English Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 46. Quoted in Olmstead, Rhetoric, 35

  93.    Auerbach, Literary Latin, 32.

  94.    DDC, 1.90; I.37.41. “Nam si a fide quisque ceciderit, a caritate etiam necesse est cadat. Non enim potest diligere quod esse non credit.”

  95.    DDC, 1.89–91.

  96.    See DDC, 1.93

  97.    Brian Stock, Augustine the Reader: Meditation, Self-knowledge, and the Ethics of Interpretation (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, Harvard University Press, 1996), 106–7.

  98.    Cf. Phil. 4:8; Rom. 5:5. The Vulgate is “caritas Dei diffusa est in cordibus nostris.” Thomas’s use of infusa rather than diffusa may be a subtle allusion to Confessions, book 8.

  99.    “Cum ergo caritas omnia credit, omnia sustinet; peto ab iis, quibus Deus spiritum suae caritatis infudit, ut credant his siqua sunt sancta, siqua utilia, siqua veritati consona proponuntur; simulque sustineant patienter, siqua minus apte, siqua minus litteratorie vel indiscrete posuero.” VLA, prologue.

100.    Augustine, On the Spirit and the Letter, trans. W. J. Sparrow Simpson (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1925), 412; Augustine, Grace and Free Will, in The Teacher; The Free Choice of the Will; Grace and Free Will, trans. Robert P. Russell (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1968), 427.

101.    Augustine, Grace and Free Will, chaps. 38–39; Augustine, On the Spirit and the Letter, chap. 56.

102.    Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (London: Jonathan Cape, 1975), 4.

103.    Barthes, 4; Barthes, S/Z (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1970), 10. “Notre littérature est marquée par le divorce impitoyable que l’institution littéraire maintient entre le fabricant et l’usager du texte, son propriétaire et son client, son auteur et son lecteur. Ce lecteur est alors plongé dans une sorte d’oisiveté, d’intransitivé, et, pour tout dire, de sérieux: au lieu de jouer lui-même, d’accéder pleinement à l’enchantement du signifiant, à la volupté de l’écriture, il ne lui reste plus en partage que la pauvre liberté de recevoir ou de rejeter le texte: la lecture n’est plus qu’un referendum. En face du text scriptible s’établit donc sa contrevaleur, sa valeur négative, réactive: ce qui peut être lu, mais non écrit: le lisible. Nous appelons classique tout texte lisible.”

104.    VLA, 3.19.

105.    VMO-S, 15–17.

106.    VMO-S, 16, 24–27.

107.    Olmstead, Rhetoric, 35. Cf. DDC, 4.28.

108.    VMO-S, 21.

109.    VMO-S, 21.

110.    VMO-S, 23.

111.    VMO-S, 24–27.

112.    VMO-S, prologue.

113.    VMO-S, 25.

114.    VMO-S, 23.

5. LANGUAGE, LITERACY, AND THE SAINTLY BODY

    1.    Thomas of Cantimpré, Vita Lutgardis Aquiriensis, ed. Godfrey Henschen, Acta Sanctorum III (June 16): 187–209; English translation, Thomas of Cantimpré, The Life of Lutgard of Aywières, in Thomas of Cantimpré: The Collected Saints’ Lives, ed. Barbara Newman, trans. Margot H. King and Barbara Newman (Turnhout: Brepols, 2009), 3.19. Henceforth VLA in the notes. Extended Latin passages will be provided in the notes with column numbers from the Acta Sanctorum.

    2.    VLA, 3.19

    3.    VLA, 3.19.

    4.    VLA, 3.19.

    5.    Alexandra Barratt, “Language and the Body in Thomas of Cantimpré’s Life of Lutgard of Aywières,” Cistercian Studies Quarterly 30, no. 3 (1995): 346.

    6.    Barratt, 346.

    7.    Barratt, 340.

    8.    VLA, 1.12.

    9.    VLA, 1.15.

  10.    VLA, 2.33.

  11.    Including VLA, 1.12, 1.15, 1.16, 2.23, 2.32, 2.40, 2.43, 3.9.

  12.    Based on the vita’s representation of Lutgard’s literacy, Barratt concludes that Lutgard had neither the education required for deeper interpretive exercise of the scriptures nor a literal understanding of Latin beyond the “passive” knowledge acquired from the repetition of certain passages in the daily rounds of monastic life (Barratt, 347). Barratt’s contention that Lutgard had passive knowledge of Latin is based on Thomas’s use of adjectives like idiotae, rusticae, and laica to describe Lutgard’s relation to literacy. These descriptors contrast Lutgard with the litteratis monialibus surrounding her, and the magis litterata Sybille de Gages. However, it is unlikely that the prioress of a monastery would be illiterate in the most profound sense of the word, as she would presumably have correspondence to keep up and would be constantly participating in the complexities of the full monastic liturgy, which is far more extensive than repeated recitation of the little hours. Thus, even if we grant that her Latin was acquired aurally and used verbally, which in itself is doubtful given her responsibilities as prioress, the term “passive” to describe such acquisition does not sufficiently capture the amount of Latin she would have needed to perform her liturgical duties. See Anke Passenier, “ ‘Women on the Loose’: Stereotypes of Women in the Stories of Medieval Beguines,” in Female Stereotypes in Religious Traditions, ed. Ria Kloppenborg and Wouter J. Hanegraaff (Leiden: Brill, 1995), 80n62; Julie Kerr, “An Essay on Cistercian Liturgy,” 5–12, The Cistercians in Yorkshire, accessed at http://cistercians.shef.ac.uk/cistercian_life/spirituality/Liturgy/Cistercian_liturgy.pdf.

  13.    The Cistercian order was founded as a reformed monastic order in 1098 by Robert of Molesme. Believing that Benedictine monasticism no longer reflected the simplicity or austerity demanded by the rule of Benedict, he founded a “New Monastery” in the “wilderness” at Cîteaux. A balance of manual labor and prayer, asceticism, poverty, and charity were cornerstones of the monks’ vocation, practices that they understood to be necessary for the observance of the rule ad apicem litterae. The entrance of Bernard of Clairvaux in 1113 marked the beginning of a period of international expansion for the order. The movement was established in 1132 in the Low Countries in Cambrai, and found immense success there. The monastery of Villers was established in 1146 and at Aulne in 1147. See J. C. H. Blom, ed., History of the Low Countries, trans. James Kennedy (New York: Berghahn, 2006); Simone Roisin, “Sainte Lutgarde d’Aywières dans son Ordre et son Temps,” Collectanea Ordinis Cisterciensum Reformatorum 8 (1946): 161–62.

  14.    For an extensive reading of the image of bride of Christ in the Vita Lutgardis (with reference to his corpus as a whole and thirteenth-century hagiography more generally) see Dyan Elliott, The Bride of Christ Goes to Hell: Metaphor and Embodiment in the Lives of Pious Women, 200–1500, Middle Ages Series (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), chap. 6. Elliott examines Bernard’s works in relation to this tradition rather than William’s. Her study considers the development of the topos of the sponsa Christi in light of Thomas’s evolving understanding of the relationship between male sponsors and mulieres sanctae.

  15.    Simone Roisin was the first to identify the Vita Lutgardis as emerging from a “Cistercian milieu” and engaging with the concerns and themes dominant in Cistercian spirituality. See Roisin, L’hagiographie Cistercienne dans le Diocèse du Liège au XIIIe siècle (Louvain: Bibliothèque de l’Université, 1947); Roisin, “La méthode hagiographique de Thomas de Cantimpré,” in Miscellanea Historica in honorem Alberti de Meyer. Universitatis catholicae in oppido lovaniensi iam annos XXV professoris, vol. 1 (Louvain: Bibliothèque de l’Université, 1946). My argument builds upon her contention that the vita is theologically and generically indebted to this Cistercian milieu. Thomas’s interest in Cistercian theology and hagiography, Roisin argues, is most explicitly apparent in the Vita Lutgardis (although it can be seen as early as the Life of Margaret of Ypres). This Cistercian influence, according to Roisin, is evident in a new focus on the internal dynamics of piety, the total conquest of the soul by God, and the concomitant representation of sanctity as a matter of interiority rather than a succession of extraordinary paramystical deeds manifest in the body (such as levitations, trances, preservations from physical danger, and the traversing of dangerous rivers) that mark Thomas’s earlier works (“La méthode,” 1:553–34).

  16.    For consideration of the subject, see, for example, Thérèse de Hemptinne and María Eugenia Góngora, eds., The Voice of Silence: Women’s Literacy in a Men’s Church (Turnhout: Brepols, 2004); Diane Watt, Medieval Women’s Writing: Works by and for Women in England, 1100–1500 (Cambridge: Polity, 2007); Anneke B. Mulder-Bakker and Liz H. McAvoy, eds., Women and Experience in Later Medieval Writing: Reading the Book of Life (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). The locus classicus for this discussion is Herbert Grundmann, “Litteratus-illitteratus: Der Wandel einer Bildungsnorm vom Alterum zum Mittlealter,” Archiv für Kulturgeschichte 40 (1958): 1–65.

  17.    Grundmann, 7–8.

  18.    M. T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record: England, 1066–1307 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 180.

  19.    Grundmann, “Litteratus-illitteratus,” 8.

  20.    Walter Simons, Cities of Ladies: Beguine Communities in the Medieval Low Countries 1200–1565 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 31.

  21.    Simons, 7.

  22.    Including, for instance, the Benedictine nuns of Saint Catherine’s, who did, in fact, have a copy of the Vita Lutgardis among their possessions. Alfred Deboutte, De Heilige Lutgart (Tentoonstelling uitgave van de Gilde van Sint Lutgard, Brugge, 1963), 19–29.

  23.    Kerr, “An Essay on Cistercian Liturgy,” 5–12.

  24.    Perhaps in response to these grades of literacy within the monastery and in order to facilitate the use of the text as an exemplum for the sisters, Martinus Cawley suggests that the Old French version of the vita was composed by Sybille de Gages herself. Martinus Cawley, trans., The Lives of Ida of Nivelles, Lutgard and Alice the Leper (Lafayette, OR: Our Lady of Guadalupe Abbey, 1987), n.p., “Important Note on the Latin Text.” A transcription of the Old French version is available in Guido Hendrix, “Primitive Versions of the Vita Lutgardis,” Cîteaux 29 (1978): 153–209.

  25.    Passenier, “ ‘Women on the Loose,’ ” 80.

  26.    Ernest McDonnell, The Beguines and Beghards in Medieval Culture: With Special Emphasis on the Belgian Scene (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1954), 420, quoted in Passenier, “ ‘Women on the Loose,’ ” 80.

  27.    Passenier, “ ‘Women on the Loose,’ ” 80. The feminization of the illiteratus topos was used as a marker not only of gender and as form of male protectionism against female encroachment but also as a mark of class. In her study of thirteenth-century Brabantine male conversi, Martha Newman demonstrates that these vitae complicated the traditional association of woman with body and man with spirit, of literacy with masculinity and illiteracy with femininity. Literacy, she argues, was the dominant means to distinguish between groups of people within a Cistercian monastery and a key way in which hagiographers maintained a hierarchy of privilege between choir monks and lay brothers. See Martha Newman, “Crucified by the Virtues: Monks, Lay Brothers, and Women in the Thirteenth-Century Cistercian Saints’ Lives,” in Gender and Difference in the Middle Ages, ed. Sharon Farmer et al. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 184.

  28.    Thomas Aquinas argued that learning from letters, as any acquired knowledge, is empirical, thus troubling the distinction between experience and the book made by clerics and hagiographers. See Aquinas, Summa Theologiae 3a.9.2.

  29.    Mulder-Bakker and McAvoy, Women and Experience, 1.

  30.    Hugh of Floreffe, Vita Beatae Juettae sive Juttae, viduae reclusae, Hui in Belgio, ed. J. Bollandus, Acta Santorum II (January 13): 145–69; English translation by Jo Ann McNamara (Toronto: Peregrina, 2000), 44, quoted in Mulder-Bakker and McAvoy, Women and Experience, 2. Not all holy women of the thirteenth century were described as illitterata. We will see below the importance given to the literacy of the nuns of Aywières in the Vita Lutgardis, particularly the extremely learned Sybille de Gages. Juliana of Cornillon’s (b. 1153) anonymous hagiographer says that she was able to read the Bible in Latin and French as well as Augustine and Bernard and that she could infer the spiritual meaning of various passages. Vita Iulianae, ed. G. Henschen, Acta Sanctorum (April 5): 435–75, quoted in Katrien Heene, “ ‘De litterali et morali earum instruccione’: Women’s Literacy in Thirteenth-Century Latin Agogic Texts,” in The Voice of Silence, ed. Thérèse de Hamptinne and María Eugenia Góngora (Turnhout: Brepols, 2006), 155. Such literacy on the part of some saintly women was not represented as performing the same function as it did for men in late-medieval vitae. Katrien Heene has shown that in a much greater proportion than men, women were said to read in order to build up their virtue and piety while male literacy was usually connected with the knowledge required to perform the office of a priest, preacher, or head of a noble household (163). Heene argues that the vitae did not explain such a gendered difference with misogynistic discourse of sex polarity that was adopted from Aristotle by thirteenth-century universities. Although university discourse was extremely powerful (and many of the hagiographers whom Heene studies, including Thomas, were trained in the schools), she shows that the vitae did not explain women’s learning as divine condescension that was miraculously provided as compensation for feminine deficiencies. However, the use of literacy for the building up of virtue within an individual life, as distinct from the public, institutional power of men—whether or not this split is figured in Aristotelian-inspired misogynistic absolutes—is an instance of the division of power between public and private, official and charismatic learning, in which the sphere of public influence is politically privileged.

  31.    Beatrice’s hagiographer wrote that her mother taught her to read the Psalter when she was only five. Beatrice was represented by the topos of the “diligent pupil.” However, she was said to only understand deeper theological mysteries when in ecstasy, and these insights did not remain present in her mind once she returned to a state of consciousness. See Heene, 153–55.

  32.    On the pervasiveness of this association, see Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 217.

  33.    Jean Leclercq, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God: A Study of Monastic Culture, trans. Catharine Misrahi (New York: Fordham University Press, 1982), 94.

  34.    For a study of the tradition of medieval commentary on the Song of Songs understood as a genre, see E. Anne Matter, The Voice of My Beloved: The Song of Songs in Western Medieval Christianity, Middle Ages Series (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990). The first chapter treats Origen as the matrix within which the exegetical tradition arises, and the following chapters consider the internal and external transformation of this commentary form in vernacular poetry. The book does not address its use in a hagiographical context. Other studies include Denys Turner, Eros and Allegory: Medieval Exegesis of the Song of Songs (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian, 1995); Denis Reveney, Language, Self and Love: Hermeneutics in Richard Rolle and the Commentaries on the Song of Songs (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2001); and Ann W. Astell, The Song of Songs in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995).

  35.    Origen on First Principles: Being Koetschau’s Text of the “De Principiis,” trans. G. W. Butterworth (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1973), bk. 1, preface, 2. Henceforth DP in the notes. The translation is sometimes modified here to more accurately reflect the gender-neutral language of Origen’s text.

  36.    DP, bk. 1, preface, 3.

  37.    For example, DP, 3.6.7. That exercising the mind through difficult interpretive exercises is pleasurable and a way to avoid the dangers of boredom is a view shared by Augustine and Origen (see the previous chapter for a discussion of Augustine). The accent for Augustine falls, however, on the way in which figural language maintains the interest of a reader and thus its rhetorical importance. For Origen, the work of allegorical interpretation is not only one that excites and maintains attention to the text, but is an operation on the reader that works through the homology between the literal, soulish, and spiritual levels of the text and their body, soul, and spirit.

  38.    Origen of Alexandria, The Song of Songs: Commentary and Homilies, trans., R. P. Lawson (London: Longmans, Green, 1957). Henceforth Comm. Sg. in the notes.

  39.    DP, 1.4.1.

  40.    DP, 4.1.7; Comm. Sg., prologue, 2.

  41.    DP, 4.2.2.

  42.    DP, 4.2.4.

  43.    See Comm. Sg., prologue, 3.

  44.    Comm. Sg., prologue, 1.

  45.    For Cistercian adaptations of Origen’s scheme, see Columba Hart’s comment in William of Saint-Thierry, Exposition on the Song of Songs, vol. 2 of The Works of William of Saint-Thierry, trans. Columba Hart, Cistercian Fathers Series 6 (Spencer, MA: Cistercian, 1970), 11n34.

  46.    Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermons on the Song of Songs, vol. 1 of The Works of Bernard of Clairvaux, trans. Kilian Walsh, Cistercian Fathers Series 4 (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian, 1971), 1:20.5.9.

  47.    For an account of some of these twelfth-century texts, including the works of Pierre de Blois, Pierre Comestor, and Guigo II, see Jean Leclercq, “Aspects Spirituels La Symbolique du Livre au XIIe Siècle,” L’homme Devant Dieu: Mélanges offerts au Père Henri de Lubac (Paris: Aubier, 1964), 2:63–72. Leclercq argues that whereas the notion of the book of conscience was understood by patristic authors to contain the list of one’s deeds to be opened at the Last Judgment, during the twelfth century, the metaphor was reprised and extended to apply to the entirety of the moral life, as the conscience and heart were described as books that must be continually opened in order to be read and written by the living person in accord with the Book of Life, which the (probably Cistercian) author of Sur la demeure interieure identified with Christ, the soul’s exemplar (66).

  48.    Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermons on the Song of Songs, sermon 1.5.11. The Latin edition is Sermones super cantica canticorum, Patrologiae cursus completus, Series Latina (Patrologia Latina), vol. 182, ed. J.-P. Migne (Paris: Garnier,1879), 0794A.

  49.    Song of Sg. 1:1; Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermons on the Song of Songs, sermon 3.1. “Hodie legimus in libro experientiae. Convertimini ad vos ipsos, et attendat unusquisque conscientiam suam super his quae dicenda sunt. Explorare velim, si cui unquam vestrum ex sententia dicere datum sit: Osculetur me osculo oris sui.”

  50.    Amy Hollywood, “Spiritual but Not Religious,” Harvard Divinity Bulletin 38, nos. 1–2 (Winter/Spring 2010): 24; Bernard McGinn, The Growth of Mysticism: Gregory the Great Through the Twelfth Century, The Presence of God: A History of Western Christian Mysticism 2 (New York: Crossroad, 1994), 26. McGinn notes that the mutual imbrication of text and experience undermines a view of mysticism as spontaneously autobiographical or a result of “direct experience” that somehow stands independently from a theological matrix. See also Leclercq, “Aspects Spirituels,” 70–71; Amy Hollywood, “Song, Experience, and the Book in Benedictine Monasticism,” in The Cambridge Companion to Christian Mysticism, ed. Amy Hollywood and Patricia Z. Beckman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 59–79.

  51.    Patrologia Latina 156, 26, quoted in Leclercq, 70. “Cum unusquisque intra seipsum, quasi in libro, scriptum attendat quidquid de diversis tentationibus praedicatoris lingua retractat.”

  52.    Leclercq, 70.

  53.    In addition to William’s terminology in the preface, Thomas’s description of Lutgard’s exchange of hearts with Christ (VLA, 1.12) is very close to the Expositions (94), and his description of Lutgard as a dove meditating on Christ’s wound as on the arc (VLA, 1.3) echoes William’s description in De contemplando Deo (3) of Christ’s wound as the ostium archae. On these comparisons, as well as Thomas’s debt to Bernard and William for his image of the saint as the “bride of Christ,” see Bernard McGinn, The Flowering of Mysticism: Men and Women in the New Mysticism (1200–1350), The Presence of God: A History of Western Christian Mysticism 3 (New York: Crossroad, 1991), 401nn49, 51, 52.

  54.    Simone Roisin argues that Thomas’s use of these terms to organize the hagiography shows his adoption of a “mystical point of view.” The Life of Christina the Astonishing also uses a threefold division to describe the stages of Christina’s life—how she was nourished (nutrita), her education (educata), and her deeds (gesta); Thomas of Cantimpré, The Life of Christina the Astonishing, in Thomas of Cantimpré: The Collected Saints’ Lives, prologue, 3. Roisin argues that this division is chronological while Lutgard’s beginner-progressing-perfect is atemporal and thus accords with Thomas’s “mystical” turn. Roisin, “La méthode,” 554. It is not only a different temporality that is in play here, however. Christina’s division is blatantly physical, emphasizing the somatic nature of what is to follow. Contesting this view, Barbara Newman argues that the text is constructed of loosely connected anecdotes. See Barbara Newman, introduction to Thomas of Cantimpré: The Collected Saints’ Lives, 18.

  55.    The Latin edition is Guillaume de Saint-Thierry, Exposé sur le Cantique des cantiques, trans. Jean-Marie Déchanet, Sources Chrétiennes 82 (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1998); English translation, William of Saint-Thierry, Exposition on the Song of Songs, preface, 13. Henceforth Exp. Sg. in the notes. Translations have been slightly modified for gender neutrality.

  56.    Guillaume de Saint-Thierry, Lettre aux Frères du Mont-Dieu (Lettre d’or), Sources Chrétiennes 223, ed. Jean Déchanet (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1976), sec. 41; English translation by Theodore Berkeley, The Golden Epistle: A Letter to the Brethren at Mont-Dieu (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian, 1980).

  57.    Exp. Sg., preface, 1.

  58.    See McGinn, The Growth of Mysticism, 229.

  59.    Exp. Sg., 13.

  60.    Exp. Sg., 1.

  61.    Exp. Sg., 14.

  62.    Exp. Sg., 14, 16.

  63.    Exp. Sg., 16; cf. Luke 7:47. “Modo quodam sibimet incognito, de imaginationibus ipsis corporesi, quaedam sibi concipiens sacramenta pietatis.… Diliget enim multum, et ideo praestatur, veil dimittitur ei multum.”

  64.    Exp. Sg., 15.

  65.    Exp. Sg., 17.

  66.    Exp. Sg., 17. “Quia quamdiu ab orante, in eo quem orat, corporeum quid cogitatur, pie quidem, sed non omnino spiritualiter oratur.”

  67.    Exp. Sg., 19.

  68.    Exp. Sg., 20. “Et quoniam non potest homo faciem ejus videre et vivere, hoc est plenam ejus cognitionem in hac vita apprehendere, collocat in sensu amantis, et commendat aliquam cognitionis suae effigiem, non praesumpti phantasmatis, sed piae cujusdam affectionis; quam vivens adhuc in carne, capere posit homo vel sustinere.”

  69.    Exp. Sg., 22.

  70.    Exp. Sg., 23. “Hic … quamdiu purgatur, rationalis est; purgatus autem jam spiritualis est. Sed sicut expedit rationalem statum semper in spiritualem proficere, sic necesse est spiritualem nonnumquam in rationalem redire. Semper quidem spiritualem spiritualiter agi, non hujus vitae est; semper tamen debet esse homo Dei, vel rationalis in appetitu, vel spiritualis in affectu.”

  71.    Exp. Sg., 23.

  72.    J. M. Déchanet, introduction to On the Song of Songs, by William of Saint-Thierry, xiv.

  73.    Exp. Sg., 10.

  74.    Song of Sg. 1:4.

  75.    Exp. Sg., 29. “In cellaria ergo introducta Sponsa, multa de Sponso, multa didicit de seipsa. Ubi quaecumque ei collata sunt, primo accessu ad Sponsam, irritamen amoris … Deine vero actus eam excipit purgatorius, exercendam, purgandam, non usquequaque deserendam. Egresso enim et abeunte Sponso, vulnerata caritate, desiderio absentis aestuans, sanctae novitatis suavitate affecta, gustu bono innovata, et repente destituta ac derelicta sibi.” In the hortatory subjunctive of first line, “Let him kiss me with the kiss of his mouth!” William hears a cry of longing and entreaty that would not be present if the bride had simply issued the demand, “kiss me.” In William’s view, the poem is framed by this announcement of the bride’s longing for the absent beloved, a longing that William considers possible only because of the bride’s previous connection with the bridegroom (Exp. Sg., 36).

  76.    McGinn, The Growth of Mysticism, 242.

  77.    Exp. Sg., 146. “Citius remittitur in domum paupertatis suae, a contemplatione divitiarum Sponsi.”

  78.    Exp. Sg., 146.

  79.    Exp. Sg., 3.

  80.    Exp. Sg., 4. “Sancte Spiritus, te invocamus, ut amore tuo repleamur, o amor, ad intelligendum canticum amoris; ut et nos colloquii sancti Sponsi et Sponsae, aliquatenus efficiamur participes; ut agatur in nobis quod legitur a nobis.”

  81.    Ineke van ’t Spikjer, Fictions of the Inner Life: Religious Literature and Formation of the Self in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (Turnhout: Brepols, 2004), 209.

  82.    Cecile Line Engh similarly has a twofold understanding of the performative in Bernard’s Sermons on the Song of Songs. As sermons that are staged before an audience of monks, the preaching of the sermons was the performance of a drama in which the bride, the self, and the monastery were constructed. As utterances that are not merely expressions of belief, the performance of the sermons is performative in a theoretical sense, meaning they are “methods to establish, not express, identity.” Cecile Line Engh, Gendered Identities in Bernard of Clairvaux’s “Sermons on the Song of Songs”: Performing the Bride (Turnhout: Brepols, 2014), 5.

  83.    Exp. Sg., 4.

  84.    Our contemporary understanding of the term “affected” is in direct contradistinction to the medieval. This difference points to the difficulty of explaining the complexity of passivity and activity, inner and outer, in the monastic notion of practice. To a contemporary ear, to be affected is to simulate something that is not indicative of the true state of one’s inner life. It is a kind of Docetism in which the subject is dressed in the clothes of something that is other than him or herself. In contrast, the medieval notion of being affected, though it likewise indicates the action of an agent upon a recipient, does not indicate a counterfeit subjectivity but is understood to be, in the monastic context, the ideal to which the monk aspires. See Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 68.

  85.    Odo Brooke, Studies in Monastic Theology (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian, 1980), 24.

  86.    Exp. Sg., 94. “When a person is made to the likeness of the Maker, he or she becomes a ‘god-affected’ person, that is, becomes one spirit with God, beautiful in Beauty, good in the Good. Such a one … exists in God through grace as what God is by nature.” (Cumque efficitur ad similitudinem facientis, fit homo Deo affectus; hoc est cum Deo unus spiritu; pulcher in pulchro, bonus in bono … existens in Deo per gratiam, quod ille est per naturam). Exp. Sg., 94; translation by Bernard McGinn in The Growth of Mysticism, 231.

  87.    See Amy Hollywood on this paradox, particularly as it operates in John Cassian and Bernard of Clairvaux, in “Spiritual but Not Religious,” 23; Hollywood, “Song, Experience, and the Book,” 65–68.

  88.    VLA, 1.12.

  89.    VLA, 1.2, 1.5.

  90.    VLA, 1.7.

  91.    Her visions are of the human Jesus, VLA, 1.12, 1.13, 1.14, 1.19, 1.21; other saints comforting and confirming her calling, VLA, 1.8, 1.9, 1.15; the sun descending at night, VLA, 1.11; her suspension in air, VLA, 1.10; her miraculous crowning, VLA, 1.17.

  92.    VLA, 2.21.

  93.    VLA, 2.23.

  94.    VLA, 2.5, 2.17.

  95.    VLA, 2.1, 2.23.

  96.    VLA, 2.17, 2.6.

  97.    VLA, 3.4, 3.9.

  98.    VLA, 1.18; Exp. Sg., 46.

  99.    VLA, 1.16. “A sponso enim introducta in cellam vinariam, invitata erat; & postquam, ut cara, comedit, id est, cum labore edit poenitentiae panem; & ut carior, bibit abundantium gratiarum; tandem, sicut carissima, inebriata est; & ideo modum excedens despientium spiritu ineffabiliter laetabatur.”

100.    VLA, 3.9.

101.    VLA, 3.6, 3.9, 3.12, 3.13, 3.16.

102.    Visions preparing her for death, VLA, 3.1, 3.3, 3.11; visions of death not yet at hand, VLA, 3.9.

103.    Exp. Sg., 94.

104.    See Newman, Thomas of Cantimpré, 226n62. The epithet magis litterata occurs in 3.12. The episode in which this occurs follows the same pattern as those in book 2 where laica moniale is used, thus giving further evidence for Henschen’s interpretation.

105.    Saint Catherine, VLA, 1.9; Innocent III, VLA, 2.8; the godhead, VLA, 1.15; Lutgard’s reporting, VLA, 2.8.

106.    Augustine, On Christian Teaching, trans. R. P. H. Green (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), preface, 5. Henceforth DDC in the notes. See also DDC, preface, 12–14. Thomas, who was an Augustinian prior to his conversion to the Dominican order, quotes directly from the DDC, 4.11, in the prologue to the VLA. See the previous chapter for an analysis of Thomas’s use of Augustine in the VLA.

107.    Barbara Newman notes that this is the first mention of the “exchange of hearts” in the medieval tradition, a topos that will recur in the vitae of Mechthild of Hackeborn and Gertrude of Helfta in the next generation. Thomas of Cantimpré: The Collected Saints’ Lives, 227n63. Newman has an essay on the exchange of hearts, “Iam cor meum non sit suum: Exchanging Hearts from Heloise to Helfta,” in From Knowledge to Beatitude: Saint Victor, Twelfth-Century Scholars, and Beyond: Essays in Honor of Grover A. Zinn Jr., ed. E. Ann Matter and Lesley Smith (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013), 281–99.

108.    Exp. Sg., 16.

109.    This narrative further confuses the temporal progression of Lutgard’s Life, as she seems here to have achieved a state that is later deemed impossible in this life, namely to have perfect concentration and the ability to “banish every thought while saying the Hours” (VLA, 2.17).

110.    Exp. Sg., 21. “Sed rursum, divinae gratia illa cognitionis, quae sicut dictum est non fit nisis in sensu, vel intellectu illuminati amoris … quanto beatus pauper spiritu, et humilis, et quietus, et tremens sermons Domini, et simplex animus, cum quo solet esse sermocinatio Spiritus sancti, anete cognitionis vel intellectus ipsius reverentiam, paupertatis, et humilitatis, et simplicitatis suae verius et devotius recognoverit infirmitates; et sensus ad hoc attulerit, tanto subtiliores, quanto simpliciores; non tam in litteratura, quam in potentiis Domini, et in justitia ejus solius.”

111.    William’s equations of literacy and arrogance seem to stand in opposition to the views of Augustine, who pairs literacy with humility. However, it is worth noting that William’s distinction between divinely and textually obtained knowledge appears in a book—indeed, in a passage that cites yet another text. Given this literary context, it seems better to understand William’s assertion of the limits of literature as an appeal to the paradoxical passivity of a cultivated humility, the affect of humility affected in the soul by the divine power through the medium of the text. Thus, William’s appeal to dependence on divine power as opposed to “literature” is a comment on the uses and relations of various kinds of knowledge rather than a denunciation of the book in itself or its prohibition for those who receive infused knowledge. For William and Augustine, the aim is the cultivation of humility, humility that arises through a dependence on something other than the independent self, whether that be a text or God. On the fraught relation between learning and the love for God—sometimes articulated as a distinction between the clerical and the monastic spheres, though that dichotomy is not a simple one—in Western monasticism, see Jean Leclercq’s The Love of Learning and the Desire for God. He argues that the relation between study and the desire for eternal life (which demanded detachment from all things earthly, including learning) was a constantly negotiated tension, which never achieved an ideal synthesis but was differently articulated throughout history (23).

112.    VLA, 1.2. “Quam cum juvenis, divitiis pollens & genere, procaretur, animum interdum cœpit verbis illius leniter inclinare. Cumque tempus & locum juvenis observaret, clam de nocte domum, in qua virgo jacebat, adire tentabat. Nec mora: cum accessisset, repentino timore correptus aufugit. Institit ergo diabolus miris modis, ut ad consensum. puellarem animum inclinaret: sed frustra, quia Omnipotens non permisit. Cumque ad colloquium juvenis simplex quandoque puella sederet, apparuit ipsi Christus in ipsa humanitatis forma, qua inter homines quondam fuerat conversatus; & pectori vestem detrahens, qua videbatur obtectus, vulnus lateris ostendit, quasi recenti sanguine cruentatum, dicens: Blanditias inepti amoris ulterius non requiras: hic jugiter contemplare quid diligas, & cur diligas: hic totius puritatis delicias tibi spondeo consequendas” (0237D-0237E).

113.    L. Reypens, “Sint Lutgarts mystieke opgang,” Ons Geestelijk Erf 20 (1946):17–19, noted by Newman in Thomas of Cantimpré, 218n22.

114.    Exp. Sg., 16.

115.    “Tali igitur Lutgardis oraculo pavefacta, statim oculis cordis hæsit, quid vidisset excipere: & quasi columba meditans, in fenestra ad introitum solaris luminis, ostium crystallinum arcæ typici corporis Christi pertinaciter observabat. Mox flore carnis abeso, vultu palluit, ut omnis amans: & superno interius splendore lustrata, totius vanitatis se sensit amisisse caliginem” (0237E).

116.    Leclercq, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God, 16.

117.    In On Contemplating God, William of Saint-Thierry compares the wound in Christ’s side to the door of Noah’s Ark. While contemplating Christ in the “abasement of his incarnation,” he writes that he becomes “like Thomas, that man of desires,” wanting “to see (videre) and touch the whole of him and—what is more—to approach the most holy wound in his side, the portal of the ark [ostium arcae] that is there made, and that not only to put my finger or my whole hand into it, but wholly enter into Jesus’ very heart [intrem usque ad ipsum cor Iesu].” In the next clause, William seamlessly elides Noah’s Ark and the Ark of the Covenant with the body of Christ that “holds within itself the manna of the Godhead.” William of Saint-Thierry, On Contemplating God: Prayer, Meditations, trans. Sister Penelope, Cistercian Fathers Series 3 (Spencer, MA: Cistercian, 1971), 38; Latin from De Contemplando Deo, Library of Latin Texts, Series A (Turnhout: Brepols, 2014), par. 3, 154, l.48.

118.    This description of the visionary moment leads to the inevitable question of whether Lutgard’s first vision arose while the she was reading or looking at an icon of the bleeding Christ or the Ark of the Covenant, a hypothesis that makes sense given the scene’s elaboration in terms of typology. However, Thomas does not make this explicit.

119.    VLA, 1.13. “In ipso ostio ecclesiæ ei Christus cruci affixus cruentatus occurrit: deponensque brachium cruci affixum, amplexatus est occurrentem, & os ejus vulneri dextri lateris applicavit. Ubi tantum dulcedinis hausit, quod semper ex tunc in Dei servitio robustior & alacrior fuit. Referebant qui hæc, illa revelante, illo in tempore & diu postea probaverunt, quod saliva oris ejus super omnem mellis dulcorem suavius sapiebat. Quid miri? Favus distillans labia tua, Sponsa; & mel divinitatis, & lac humanitatis Christi, etiam tacente lingua, cor interius ruminabat” (0239E).

120.    Leclercq, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God, 73.

121.    Vincent Gillespie, “ ‘Lukyng in haly bukes’: Lectio in Some Late Medieval Spiritual Miscellanies,” Analecta Cartusiana 106 (1984): 11.

122.    Leclercq, “Aspects Spirituels,” 66.

123.    Exp. Sg., 144.

124.    Exp. Sg., 4.

6. THE USES OF ASTONISHMENT

    1.    As a well-educated author, Sulpicius Severus was familiar with the Latin Life of Antony, the Latin fathers, classical conventions of good Latin, and the metrics of proper prose. While he had no Gallic predecessors on which to model Martin, F. R. Hoare argues that Sulpicius was attempting to promote Martin as another Antony, aligning him with the venerable figure in order to oppose those who saw Martin simply as uncouth and unworthy of Episcopal office, which in Gaul was generally held by the refined and urbane. See F. X. Noble and Thomas Heads, eds., Soldiers of Christ: Saints and Saints’ Lives from Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995), 2.

    2.    Sulpicius Severus, The Life of Martin of Tours, trans. F. R. Hoare, in Soldiers of Christ (University Park: Pennsylvania State University, 1995), 1–29. Latin from Vie de Saint Martin, ed. and trans. Jacques Fontaine, 3 vols., Sources Chrétiennes 133–35 (Paris, 1967, 1968, 1969).

    3.    Sulpicius Severus, chap. 24.

    4.    Sulpicius Severus, preface.

    5.    Sulpicius Severus, chap. 1.

    6.    Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 160.

    7.    Sulpicius Severus, The Life of Martin of Tours, chap. 10.

    8.    Sulpicius Severus, chap. 26.

    9.    Sulpicius Severus, chap. 26.

  10.    Derek Krueger, “Hagiography as an Ascetic Practice in the Early Christian East,” Journal of Religion 79, no. 2 (April 1999): 230.

  11.    Krueger, 2

  12.    Thomas of Cantimpré, Vita Lutgardis Aquiriensis, ed. Godfrey Henschen, Acta Sanctorum III (June 16): 187–209. Henceforth VLA in the notes. English translation, unless otherwise noted, from Thomas of Cantimpré, The Life of Lutgard of Aywières, in Thomas of Cantimpré: The Collected Saints’ Lives, ed. Barbara Newman, trans. Margot H. King and Barbara Newman (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008), 211–96. Extended Latin passages will be provided in the notes with column numbers from the Acta Sanctorum.

  13.    On the notion of the visionary becoming a vision, see Amy Hollywood, The Soul as Virgin Wife: Mechthild of Magdebug, Marguerite Porete, and Meister Eckhart (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 1995), 35.

  14.    On the mediating function of the imagination and its complex and confusing relation to the body in spiritual vision, see Augustine’s attempt to discern the status of Paul’s rapture in The Literal Commentary on Genesis, bk. 12. Images—the product of the imagination—are the product of a mixture of the corporeal and incorporeal and stand in distinction to the intellect’s perception of “substance.” Augustine, The Literal Meaning of Genesis, trans. John Hammond Taylor (New York: Newman, 1982), 12, 181.

  15.    Hollywood, The Soul as Virgin Wife, 35.

  16.    Hollywood, 37.

  17.    Hollywood, 52.

  18.    Simone Roisin, L’hagiographie Cistercienne dans le diocèse de Liège au XIIIe siècle (Louvain: Bibliothèque de l’Université, 1947), 8.

  19.    Roisin, 151.

  20.    Roisin, 8, 11.

  21.    Roisin, 140.

  22.    Roisin, 275.

  23.    See Ludwig Zoepf, Das Heiligen-Leben im 10 Jahrhundert (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1908), 34–35.

  24.    Roisin, L’hagiographie Cistercienne, 210.

  25.    Roisin, 211–12.

  26.    Roisin, 212.

  27.    VLA, 1.15. “Proinde ad recordationem illius acutissimae visionis aquilae, Joannis scilicet Euangelistae, qui fluenta Euangelii de ipso sacro Dominici pectoris fonte potavit; apparuit ei in spiritu aquila, tanto pennarum nitore refulgens, ut totus potuisset orbis illius claritatis radiis illustrari. Ad visionem ergo illius super id quod dici potest admiratione nimia stupefacta; praestolabatur ut Dominus, secundum capacitatem debilis aciei, tanti speculationis gloriam temperaret. Et factus est ita. Visionis ergo modum moderatius contemplata, vidit quod aquilia ori suo rostrum imponeret, & animam ejus tam ineffabilis luminis coruscatione repleret, ut secundum id quod viventibus possible est (quia Moysi dictum est; Non videbit me homo, & vivet) nulla eam divinitatis secreta laterent. Tanto enim de torrente voluptatis abundantius hausit in domo, quanto magnificentior Aquila vas cordis ejus extensum desiderio magis inuenit” (0240B).

  28.    VLA, 1.13, 1.14.

  29.    VLA, 1.16.

  30.    VLA, 1.19.

  31.    VLA, 1.15. “In hoc autem ei secundum conscientiam, ut spero, non erroneum testimonium habebo; quod licet ipsa in communibus verbis, rudis quodammodo & simplicissima videretur & esset; tamen numquam ab ore alicujus ita sincera, ita ardentissima, ita secundum veritatis spiritum decisa verba, in spiritualis collationis secretis inueni; in tantum, ut rudem me prorsus & hebetem ad intellectum berborum ejus saepissime reputarem. Loci adhuc & temporis memor, tantum me aliquando in verborum ejus subtilitate stupuisse profiteor; ut si diu me illa dulcis & ineffabilis admiratio tenuisset, aut amentem me utique, aut extinctum penitus reddidisset. Sed hoc non isto in tempore, de quo ad praesens scribo, sed ante moretem ejus, annis ferme sedecim, fuit” (0240D).

  32.    VLA, 1.12, 2.33.

  33.    Bernard de Clairvaux, Sermons sur le Cantique, tome 1, Sources Chrétiennes 367 (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 2007), 84.1. Translation by Bernard McGinn in The Growth of Mysticism: Gregory the Great Through the Twelfth Century, The Presence of God: A History of Western Christian Mysticism 2 (New York: Crossroad, 1994), 217. The notion of the extensum desiderio has a theological history much older than Bernard. While Origen of Alexandria, in line with classical Greek understanding, equated limitlessness (apeiron) with imperfection, a view that enabled his theorization that the first intellects found satiety (koros) in their original contemplation of the godhead (De principiis 2.8.3), Gregory of Nyssa departed fundamentally from this tradition. For Gregory, God was necessarily boundless. The limited human creature was thus incapable of fully comprehending a divinity whose infinite nature constantly exceeds the boundaries of human understanding. This is Gregory’s notion of epektasis, a term coined by Jean Daniélou in his study of Gregory, derived from Paul’s statement in Philippians 3:13–14 that he has not yet reached perfection but is “straining toward” (epekteinomenos) “the goal for the prize of the upward call of God.” The Greek epekteinō, meaning “to extend,” and in the passive, “to be extended, reach out toward,” is translated in Latin as extensum. Epektasis is the concept is that the aim of human life on earth and in heaven is the endless stretching forth of the soul after the ever-elusive godhead, whose presence is paradoxically an experience of absence. This absence means that the desire of the soul never rests in satiety but moves “from glory to glory,” impelled and deepened by every moment of contact. Like Gregory, Bernard frequently referred to Philippians 3:13 in order to emphasize that the divine-human relation continually increases the human being’s ability to be infused by the infinite but that no perfect infusion is possible. See Jean Daniélou, introduction to From Glory to Glory: Texts from Gregory of Nyssa’s Mystical Writings (Yonkers, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1979), 3–10.

  34.    Bernard de Clairvaux, Sermons sur le Cantique, 7.3.

  35.    Jacques Le Goff, The Medieval Imagination, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 27.

  36.    Benedicta Ward, Miracles and the Medieval Mind: Theory, Record and Event 1000–1215 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987), 3.

  37.    Thomas Aquinas, Summa contra gentiles, trans. A. C. Pegis (Notre Dame IN: Notre Dame University Press, 1975), 3.101.1. “Haec autem quae praeter ordinem communiter in rebus statutum quandoque divinitus fiunt, miracula dici solent: admiramur enim aliquid cum, effectum videntes, causam ignoramus. Et quia causa una et eadem a quibusdam interdum est cognita et a quibusdam ignota, inde contingit quod videntium simul aliquem effectum, aliqui mirantur et aliqui non mirantur: astrologus enim non miratur videns eclipsim solis, quia cognoscit causam; ignarus autem huius scientiae necesse habet admirari, causam ignorans. Sic igitur est aliquid mirum quod hunc, non autem quod illum. Illud ergo simpliciter mirum est quod habet causam simpliciter occultam: et hoc sonat nomen miraculi, quod scilicet sit de se admiratione plenum, non quod hunc vel illum tantum. Causa autem simpliciter occulta omni homini est Deus: probatum enim est supra quod eius essentiam nullus homo in statu huius vitae intellectu capere potest. Illa igitur proprie miracula dicenda sunt quae divinitus fiunt praeter ordinem communiter observatum in rebus.”

  38.    Although Thomas Aquinas agrees with the strict Augustinian position that all creation, having its source in the divine will, is a miracle—though one that does not often incite wonder due to its familiarity—Thomas, in line with twelfth-century theorists like Adelard of Bath, opens a space for thinking about nature as an internally governed sphere with rules that are generally predictable, which providence can enter and disrupt in ways that are remarkable for their strangeness. On Augustine, see Ward, Miracles and the Medieval Mind, 3–4. On Thomas Aquinas, see Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750 (New York: Zone, 2001), 121; Aquinas, Summa contra gentiles, 3.99.9. On the distinction between marvel and miracle, see Jean-Claude Schmitt, Ghosts in the Middle Ages: The Living and the Dead in Medieval Society, trans. Teresa L. Fagan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 79.

  39.    VLA, 2.23. “Quoties, rapta in spiritu, passionis Dominicæ memor erat; videbatur ei, quod essentialiter per totum corpus sanguine perfusa ruberet. Hoc cum quidam religiosus Presbyter secretius audivisset, observans eam tempore opportuno, quo dubium non erat, secundum tempus Christi fore memorem passionis; aggressus est illam videre: ubi acclinis ad parietem in contemplatione jacebat. Et ecce, vidit faciem ejus & manus, quæ tantum nudæ patebant, quasi recenti perfusas sanguine relucere: cincinnos vero ejus, quasi guttis noctium, infusos sanguine. Quod videns, clam forcipe partem illorum in partem tulit; & ad lucem eos in manu ferens, cum supra modum attonitus miraretur, pia Lutgarde de raptu contemplationis ad sensum forinsecus revertente, cincinni quoque in manu stupentis ad colorem naturalem protinus revertuntur. Qui statim ultra quam credi potest, ad tam ingens spectaculum pavefactus, fere cecidit resupinus. Nota autem Lector, quod nimirum pia Lutgardis rubere sanguine visa est, quia de illis specialissime fuit in vita, qui laverunt stolas suas in sanguine Agni: ex intellectuali enim consideratione mentis interius, similitudinem traxit corpus exterius” (0249C–D).

  40.    The term ecce pervades the Gospels, particularly miraculous events that are announced by angels such as those surrounding the Annunciation, including Gabriel’s announcement to Zachariah of his muteness because of his disbelief in John’s conception (“Et ecce eris tacens, et non poteris loqui usque in diem quo hæc fiant, pro eo quod non credidisti verbis meis, quæ implebuntur in tempore suo,” Luke 1:20); Gabriel’s announcement to Mary of her miraculous conception (“Ecce concipies in utero, et paries filium, et vocabis nomen ejus Jesum,” Luke 1:31); and Mary and Elizabeth’s greeting (“Ecce enim ut facta est vox salutationis tuæ in auribus meis, exsultavit in gaudio infans in utero meo,” Luke 1:44).

  41.    VLA, 2.23.

  42.    VLA, 1.2.

  43.    Dyan Elliott, “The Physiology of Rapture,” in Medieval Theology and the Natural Body, ed. P. Biller and A. Minnis (Rochester, NY: York Medieval, 1997), 157–58. These rapturous states could be induced by good or evil spiritual influence, although in the thirteenth-century, the issue of discretion was, according to Elliott, less fraught, as evidence for the source of such raptures was believed to be fairly easily read from bodily signs. Elliott argues that Thomas was one of these thirteenth-century authorities who were casually optimistic about the possibility of interpreting the origins of an enrapt state (151).

  44.    Elliott, 142. Spiritual rapture (raptus) is derived from rapire, meaning to carry off by force, to seize, to ravish. It is synonymous with other terms like excessus mentis, in spiritu, alienato mentis (143), or from the passage under consideration here, stupefacta, capacitatem debilis aciei, amentem.

  45.    See VLA, 1.4, 1.5, 1.6.

  46.    Elliott, “The Physiology of Rapture,” 161. See also Barbara Newman, From Virile Woman to WomanChrist: Studies in Medieval Religion and Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), 286n20.

  47.    Elliott’s essay does not consider the theorization of rapture as it appeared before the high medieval period. Early Christian and Byzantine theologians developed many phenomenologies of rapture, which extensively theorized the passivity and helplessness incurred by the abstraction of the senses in the face of an overpowering divine other as well as the status of the intellect and the relation between the intellect and body in the state of rapture.

The exemplary enraptured figure of the Christian tradition is not a woman. Rather, it is the Apostle Paul, who left a richly ambiguous account in 2 Corinthians 12:2–7 of being “caught up” (raptum) to the third heaven, “whether in the body (in corpore) or out of the body (extra corpus) I know not, God knows.” The Latin raptum renders the Greek, ἁρπαγέντα, which like the verb rapire connotes being seized and carried off by force. Paul thus describes his experience with the same language of violence and helplessness that Elliott finds prevalent in descriptions of later medieval women’s raptures. However, in Paul’s case, the status of his body is in question, as his account implies that his body could have accompanied him to the third heaven. Due to Paul’s ambiguous yet authoritative report, the status of the body in states of rapture remained an open question, receiving different treatments throughout the history of Christianity.

  48.    The loss of intellective prowess in the approach to God is an important feature of mystical texts, most notably Pseudo-Dionysius’s The Mystical Theology, which describes an experience of “ecstasy” that emphasizes the role of the divestment of the intellect and sensory perception in the soul’s ascent to divine union. The treatise begins with the following advice for Timothy: “Timothy, my friend, my advice to you as you look for a sight of the mysterious things, is to leave behind [apoleipe] you everything perceived and understood, everything perceptible and understandable, all that is not and all that is, and, with your understanding laid aside [agnostos], to strive upward as much as you can toward union with him who is beyond all being and knowledge. By an undivided and absolute abandonment [ekstasei] of yourself and everything, shedding all and freed from all [panta aphelon kai ek panton apolutheis], you will be uplifted to the ray of the divine shadow which is above everything that is.” Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, The Mystical Theology, in Pseudo-Dionyius the Areopagite: The Complete Works, trans. Colm Luibheid (New York: Paulist Press, 1987), 1.1 (997B–1000A). In seeking a “sight of mysterious things,” Timothy must abandon his faculties and categories and thereby attain to a stance of utter passivity in which he is “uplifted to the ray of the divine shadow.” By means of this divestment, Pseudo-Dionysius promises, Timothy will suffer ecstasy (ti … heautou … ektasei). Sight, intellect, and knowledge—all things that fasten a person to his or her particular body, history, perception, and agency—prevent union with the unknown God. Like Timothy, Thomas undergoes a shedding of his intellective power and is thereby rendered passive and ecstatic. Unlike the ascent described in The Mystical Theology, however, Thomas’s account is inflected with a heterosexual dynamic and the passionate language of madness and forceful confinement that typically marked late medieval descriptions of rapture.

  49.    John W. Coakley, Women, Men, and Spiritual Power: Female Saints and Their Male Collaborators (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 3.

  50.    Thomas was not Lutgard’s confessor. He notes that another man, Bernard, fulfilled this task. Rather, she was Thomas’s “spiritual mother,” acting as a giver of advice and in many ways confessing Thomas, as when he went to her with the temptations he faced as a result of becoming a confessor.

  51.    Coakley, Women, Men, and Spiritual Power, 10. For an elaboration of this argument, see Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 261–68; Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone, 1991), 151–79. Dyan Elliott is less sanguine about the implications and status of the privileges women accrued through this identification. She argues that while this marriage of femaleness and bodiliness enabled new formulations of the relation of body and soul and attributions of various talents, particularly of mystical powers to women, the marriage was not a happy one and necessarily culminated in the fifteenth-century witch-hunts. Elliott, “Physiology,” 141, 167.

  52.    Thomas Aquinas explicitly argues that woman’s flawed nature also made her more humble and thus an embodiment of the New Testament ideal of “the last shall be first.” Elliott, 160.

  53.    See Hollywood, The Soul as Virgin Wife, 45–52, for her discussion of the radical divergence between Beatrice of Nazareth’s autobiographical account of her spiritual life and its “translation” by her male hagiographer, who renders her narrative in physical terms that literalize her description of the spiritual life. See also Hollywood’s discussion of Marguerite Porete’s resistance to the centrality of bodily and emotional works in the religious life and in dominant theological models of the thirteenth century, 105–7.

  54.    Coakley, Women, Men, and Spiritual Power, 2.

  55.    John Coakley, “Friars as Confidants of Holy Women in Medieval Dominican Hagiography,” in Images of Sainthood in Medieval Europe, ed. Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski and Timea Szell (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), 225.

  56.    On the hagiographer’s rendering literal and somatic the interior experiences of God that Beatrice herself describes, using the body as metaphor, see Hollywood, The Soul as Virgin Wife, 45–52; for Beatrice’s vita, see The Life of Beatrice of Nazareth, trans. Roger DeGanck (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1991). For Beatrice’s own treatise, There Are Seven Manners of Loving, see Eric Colledge’s translation in Medieval Women’s Visionary Literature, ed. Elizabeth A. Petroff (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 200–6.

  57.    Although the eagle in 1.15 is identified with John the Evangelist, it was also a common symbol for Christ according to some bestiaries, as only his eyes, which are as strong as the eagle’s, can look directly at God.

  58.    VLA, 3.9. “In momento, inquit, apparet mihi splendor inæstimabilis, & quasi fulgur video ejus ineffabilem pulchritudinem glorificationis: quæ nisi raptim transiret ab aspectu contemplationis meæ; cum vita præsenti hanc sustinere non possem. Post hunc vero fulgorem splendor intellectualis manet; & cum in ipso splendore quæro quem raptim videram, non invenio” (0258B–D).

  59.    VLA, 3.9. “Quid est Christum loqui in anima, nisi repræsentare illi suæ divitias bonitatis, sapientiæ, & decoris? Ut ex his metiatur anima, quam bonum, quamque sapide sapientem, & a virtutibus decoratum eum esse oporteat, qui ejus amorem poterit in caritate perpetua promereri. Hunc ergo audiens anima liquescit in desideriis, & nititur obtinere quem conspicit: sed quia tempus perfectæ visionis nondum venit, illum quem quasi præsentem habuit, subito perdit” (0258D–E).

7. PRODUCING THE BODY OF GOD

    1.    Thomas de Cantimpré, Bonum universale des apibus, ed. Georges Colvener (Duaci: Baltazaris Belleri, 1627); partial French translation, Thomas de Cantimpré, Les Exemples du “Livre des abeilles”: Une Vision Médievale, trans. Henri Platelle (Turnhout: Brepols, 1997). Henceforth BUA in the notes, Epistola auctoris, 1.

    2.    Cf. Rom. 5:5: “diffusa est.” Epistola auctoris, 2.

    3.    Jeremy Cohen, The Friars and the Jews: The Evolution of Medieval Anti-Judaism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982), 251. He notes that the opening canon of Lateran IV uses the image of the social order as the corpus mysticum Christi.

    4.    It is the process of this excision as conceived and realized by the friars that Cohen’s work addresses. He argues that in the thirteenth century, the friars reimagined the figure of the Jew so that the Augustinian vision of the Jews as an ancient, biblical people who bear witness to Christian truth and thus ought not to be destroyed or forcibly converted was replaced by a vision of the Jewish heretic, followers not of the Bible but the Talmud, therefore having forfeited any claim to protection. As heretics, the Jews could be conceived as dangers to the state, deserving of expulsion or conversion. This view was given concrete formulation in 1240 with the disputation about the Talmud and its burning under Gregory IX in 1242 at the Place de Grèves in Paris. The thirteenth century thus saw the “beginning of an ideology that would justify attempts to eliminate Jewish presence in Christendom” by showing “the discrepancy between the religion of ‘biblical’ Jews defended by Augustine” and the heretical Jews of rabbinic tradition. See Cohen, 242.

    5.    BUA, 2.49.1, p. 441. On the centrality of and reasons for storytelling in Dominican teaching, see Robert Sweetman, “Exemplary Care: Story-Telling and the ‘Art of Arts’ Among Thirteenth-Century Dominicans,” in From Learning to Love: Schools, Law, and Pastoral Care: Essays in Honour of Joseph W. Goering, ed. Tristan Sharp et al. (Toronto: Pontifical Institute for Mediaeval Studies, 2017), 628–46.

    6.    Gregory the Great, Dialogorum libri 4.7, Patrologiae cursus completus, Series Latina (Patrologia Latina), vol. 77, ed. J. P. Migne (Paris: Garnier, 1862), col. 153. Gregory here contrasts not word and example but reason and example: “quatenus fluctuanti animo, quod plene ratio non valet, exempla suadeant.” However, Humbert’s declaration that such vividness necessarily makes something comprehensible is, it seems, optimistic, at least when applied to Thomas’s oeuvre. The stories are indeed memorable, but their takeaway message is often profoundly unclear. This is not only because, as Martha Newman has noted in a private conversation, it is very difficult for us to know all the resonances—the cultural matrix of allusion and memory upon which listeners would draw—but because the very complexity of narrative surface can become a complicated array of figures, motivations, and plot twists and, more confusingly, may dissemble.

    7.    “Quoniam plus exempla quam verba movent secundum Gregorium et facilius intellectu capiuntur et alicuius memoria infiguntur.” See M. Michèle Mulchahey, “First the Bow Is Bent in Study … ”: Dominican Education Before 1350 (Toronto: PIMS, 1998), 461. Humbert is referencing Gregory the Great, Dialogorum libri 4, Patrologia Latina, 77.153; Gregory the Great, XL Homiliarum in Evangelia, Patrologia Latina, 177.1290D.

    8.    Robert Sweetman, “Dominican Preaching in the Low Countries 1240–1260: Materiae Praedicabiles in the Liber de natura rerum and Bonum universale de apibus of Thomas of Cantimpré” (PhD diss., University of Toronto, 1988), 185.

    9.    Dyan Elliott, Proving Woman: Female Spirituality and Inquisitional Culture in the Later Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 58.

  10.    Gregory the Great, Dialogorum libri 4.7, Patrologia Latina 77.153.

  11.    T. F. Crane argues that the exempla are almost entirely derived from historical anecdotes, containing very few commonplaces, which were typical of earlier collections. Jacques de Vitry, The Exempla, or, Illustrative Stories from the Sermones vulgares of Jacques de Vitry, ed. and trans. T. F. Crane (1890; Nendeln: Kraus Reprint, 1967), xci. Crane further notes that Thomas’s treatise inspired a similar work more than one hundred years later by fellow Dominican Johannes Nider (b. 1380), though the ant would, in this case, take the place of the bee. Nider’s De formicarius was written, he explains in the prologue, in response to the sentiment that miracles and revelations were no longer manifest in Germany. Like Thomas, Nider writes that his treatise records contemporary instances of divine intervention that he has seen or heard of. These tales are organized according to the sixty qualities of the ant and are, unlike the De apibus (though like Gregory’s Dialogues and Caesarius of Heisterbach’s Dialogus Miraculorum), told through a dialogue between Piger and the master Theologus (xcii). For De formicarius, see Catherine Chène, “Jean Nider, Formicarius (livre II, chapitre 4 et livre V, chapitres 3, 4 et 7),” in L’imaginaire du sabbat: Édition critique des textes les plus anciens (1430 c.–1440 c.), ed. Martine Ostorero et al. (Lausanne: Université de Lausanne, 1999), 99–265; Werner Tschacher, Der Formicarius des Johannes Nider von 1437/38: Studien zu den Anfängen der Hexenverfolgungen im Spätmittelalter (Aachen: Shaker, 2000).

  12.    Acts 1:3.

  13.    Thus the “immense intellectual efforts” to “correlate Christ’s invisible presence and the empirical reality of the bread and wine without denying the validity of empirical knowledge. The appearances were saved by the theories of concomitance and transubstantiation.” Gavin Langmuir, Toward a Definition of Antisemitism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 123. On the rise of doubt in the eleventh century and its relationship to increased empiricism, see Langmuir, 120–33.

  14.    For a summary of the development of pictorial realism alongside the meditative shaping of detailed images of Christ’s life in relation to this “affective piety” along with other forms of literalism connected to an emphasis on Christ’s humanity in the High Middle Ages, see Thomas Bestul, Texts of the Passion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), 70–72.

  15.    Bestul, 80.

  16.    The dossier, Platelle argues, is found at 2.29.13–23. However, Thomas famously recounts the trial and burning of the Talmud in Paris in 1.3.6. He also recounts a story of a “young Dominican tempted by the Jewish law,” a Marian miracle tale, in 2.10.19. (Neither exemplum is included in Platelle’s translation). The dossier proper contains two tales of ritual murder (2.29.13, 2.29.22) and a chapter “explaining” the cause of the Jewish need for gentile blood (2.29.23). At 2.29.15–19 are Marian miracle tales that do not explicitly involve Jews but are contextualized within the series of exempla concerning Jewish murder and conversion in relation to Mary’s status.

  17.    This is not surprising, given that Marian miracle tales are often part of polemics against Jews, and there has long been an association of Mary and anti-Jewish discourse in texts that have what Miri Rubin calls an “incarnational aesthetic.” See Miri Rubin, Mother of God: A History of the Virgin Mary (London: Allen Lane, 2009), 12–16, 161–68, 226–27; Adrienne Williams Boyarin, “Desire for Religion: Mary, a Murder Libel, a Jewish Friar, and Me,” Religion & Literature 42, nos. 1/2 (Spring–Summer 2010): 23–48.

  18.    2 Cor. 3:12–16; cf. Exod. 34:33.

  19.    2 Cor. 3:7.

  20.    Origen On First Principles: Being Koetschau’s Text of the “De Principiis,” trans. G. W. Butterworth (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1973), 4.2.6. Henceforth DP in the notes.

  21.    DP, 4.2.6.

  22.    DP, 4.2.1.

  23.    See Origen: An Exhortation to Martyrdom, Prayer, and Selected Works, trans. Rowan A. Greer (New York: Paulist Press, 1979), 196n74 for the observation that this Pauline quotation is absent from what remains of Rufinus’s translation but was preserved in the Philocalia.

  24.    DP, 4.2.6.

  25.    On the interpretation of Paul’s image in Romans 11:16–24 of the grafting of a new olive shoot onto a tree with broken branches, see Lisa Lampert, Gender and Jewish Difference from Paul to Shakespeare (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 22–26; Daniel Boyarin, A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 204. On the complex use of the story of Jacob and Esau in both Midrash and Christian authors, see Daniel Boyarin, introduction to Dying for God: Martyrdom and the Making of Christianity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999).

  26.    Langmuir, “Doubt in Christendom,” in Toward a Definition of Antisemitism, 106.

  27.    Lampert, Gender and Jewish Difference, 32.

  28.    Lampert is here using Carolyn Dinshaw’s work on the gendering of figural reading in Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989).

  29.    Notable examples of such representations of women who were spiritual virtuosi include Gregory of Nyssa’s fourth-century hagiographical portrayal of his sister Macrina, who was able, he writes, to “conquer nature” and to avoid (and teach her mother to likewise resist) behaving in any “ignoble and womanish” ways upon the death of her brother, Naucratius. See Gregory of Nyssa, “The Life of St. Macrina,” in St. Gregory of Nyssa: Ascetical Works, trans. Virginia Woods Callahan, The Fathers of the Church Series 58 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1967), 970A. The second-century martyr narrative of Perpetua and Felicitas describes Perpetua’s dream vision in which she becomes a man while battling an Egyptian in the arena before her actual martyrdom. “The Passion of SS. Perpetua and Felicitas,” in Medieval Saints: A Reader, ed. Mary-Ann Stouck (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), sec. 10. In his fourth-century account, Jerome describes Paula “overcoming the love of her children by her love of God,” and so leaving them at Ostia to sail for Jerusalem and enter the monastic life. Saint Jerome, The Life of St. Paula, Widow, chap. 4.

  30.    Rita Copeland, “Why Women Can’t Read: Medieval Hermeneutics, Statutory Law, and Lollard Heresy Trials,” in Representing Women: Law, Literature, and Feminism, ed. Susan Sage Heinzelman and Zipporah Batshaw Wiseman (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994), 257, quoted in Lampert, Gender, 43.

  31.    Lampert, 29.

  32.    The phrase is from Bernard of Clairvaux. “Vivi quidam apices nobis sunt, repraesentantes iugiter Dominicam passionem. Propter hoc et in omnes dispersi sunt regiones, ut dum iustas tanti facinoris poenas luunt ubique, testes sint nostrae redemptionis.” “Epistola” CCCLXIII, 6, in Oeuvres Complètes de Saint Bernard, ed. M. Labbé Charpentier (Paris: Libraire de Louis Vivès, editeur, 1865), 1:467. Jeremy Cohen took Bernard’s “vivi apices” for the title of his book, Living Letters of the Law: Ideas of the Jew in Medieval Christianity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 2.

  33.    Thomas recounts the burning of the Talmud in 1242 in the Place de Grève in Paris in the BUA, 1.3.6, pp. 17–18. On this event, see Jeremy Cohen, Living Letters of the Law (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 317–42; Robert Chazan brings a full survey of the literature in “Trial, Condemnation and Censorship,” in The Trial of the Talmud Paris, 1240 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012), 1–92, see especially 3n1; Saadia R. Eisenberg, “Reading Medieval Religious Disputation: The 1240 “Debate” Between Rabbi Yehiel of Paris and Nicholas Donin” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 2008). Thomas is also an important source for the myth of Jewish male menses, writing in another exemplum in which he glosses Augustine that Jewish men bleed every Good Friday because of a “defect in their blood” given as a curse at the crucifixion when the “impious Jews” called out, “His blood be upon us and upon our children” (Matt. 27:25); BUA, 2.29.23. In 1240, Caesarius of Heisterbach also wrote that Jews suffered from the “flux sanguinis.” Willis Johnson argues that this claim about male bleeding was not understood as a form of menstruation, and so remained ungendered by medieval authors. Instead, he holds that Jewish male bleeding was associated with the bleeding from the bowels of heretics and traitors like Judas and Arius until early modernity, when the gendering of the image occurred in a shift to its association with menstruation. See Willis Johnson, “The Myth of Jewish Male Menses,” Journal of Medieval History 24, no. 3 (1998): 273–95.

  34.    BUA, 1.25.7, p. 105.

  35.    BUA, 1.25.6, pp. 103–4.

  36.    BUA, 1.25.5, pp. 102–3.

  37.    “Fourth Lateran Council,” Medieval Sourcebook Project, Fordham University, https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/basis/lateran4.asp, accessed March 28, 2018.

  38.    Third Lateran Council, Canon 26: “Jews and Saracens are not to be allowed to have Christian servants in their houses, either under pretence of nourishing their children or for service or any other reason.” Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, ed. and trans. Norman P. Tanner (Washington, DC, 1990), www.piar.hu/councils/ecum11.htm#canons, accessed March 28, 2018. See also S. Grayzel, The Church and the Jews in the XIIIth Century: A Study of Their Relations During the Years 1198–1254 Based on the Papal Letters and Conciliar Decrees of the Period (New York: Hermon Press, 1966), 297–99; Valerie Fields, Wet Nursing: A History from Antiquity to the Present (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), 32–48. On wet nursing and its control, see Elisheva Baumgarten, Mothers and Children: Jewish Family Life in the Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), particularly chapter 4 in which she discusses Christian women domestic servants in general and wet nurses in particular. See also Rebecca Winer, “Conscripting the Breast: Lactation, Slavery and Salvation in Realms of Aragon and Kingdom of Majorca, c. 1250–1300,” Jewish History 34, no. 2 (2008): 164–84. Ecclesiastical anxieties regarding Christian servants in Jewish homes took many forms. First, the Christian servant might be converted to Judaism through exposure to it. Second, she might engage in a sexual relationship with her Jewish master. Third, specifically for a wet nurse, she might be asked to pump and discard her breast milk after taking communion and thus disrespect the host. On the other hand, breast milk was believed to have formative properties for a developing infant, playing a crucial role in what was considered to be something like the second part of pregnancy. In 1245, Bartholomeus Anglicus wrote with great influence in De proprietatibus rerum that the infant’s body is incompletely made in utero from maternal blood. Following birth, uterine blood moves into the breasts and becomes milk. Breastfeeding continues the process of infant formation through the developmental power of blood, now by drinking breast milk. See Winer, 174.

  39.    From an early period (ca. 397), Augustine followed the tradition of reading Cain and Abel as figures for the Jews and Christ. As Cain killed Abel, so the Jews killed their brother, Jesus, and, like Cain, were condemned to live in exile with great sorrow, in subjugation to gentile rulers but also protected from murder by the mark of Cain. The mark of Cain is the law itself, and neither the Jews nor the law, Augustine maintains, should be slain. The law is what makes the Jews, Jews. If assimilated or converted, the role that God ordained for them would end. Bearers and embodiments of the law, they read the scripture without understanding, preserving the books that testified to Christ without knowing their real meaning for they were “carnal.” In this vein, Augustine develops the image of the Jews as the writing desks (scrinaria) of the Christians—unable to comprehend the christological meaning of the scripture they carry and preserve: “For what else is this nation now but a desk for the Christians, bearing the law and the prophets as testimony to the tenets of the church, so that we honor through the sacrament what it announces through the letter.” Augustine, “Reply to Faustus, the Manichaean,” in The Works of Aurelius Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, a New Translation, vol. 5, Writings in Connection with the Manichaean Heresy, ed. Marcus A. Dodds (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1872), 12.23, p. 220.

  40.    Augustine, “Reply to Faustus,” 12.12, p. 213.

  41.    BUA, 2.10.19, p. 172.

  42.    On the relationship between sex and conversion, see David Nirenberg, “Love Between Muslim and Jew in Medieval Spain a Triangular Affair,” in Jews, Muslims and Christians in and Around the Crown of Aragon: Essays in Honour of Professor Elena Lourie, ed. Harvey Hames (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 127–56; Paola Tartkoff, Between Christian and Jew: Conversion and Inquisition in the Crown of Aragon, 1250–1391 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012); Tartkoff, “Jewish Women and Apostasy,” Jewish History 24, no. 1 (2010): 7–32.

  43.    BUA, 2.29.1, p. 274. “Si hoc ergo in minimis animalibus reperitur, quid calumniaris Iudaee, unam apud Christianos virginem peperisse? Et hanc non quemlibet hominem, sed Christum, quem Messiam venisse credimus, & vos dicitis esse venturum. Videas Iudaee Christum natum, & non mireris virginis partum.”

  44.    BUA, 2.29.21, p. 300.

  45.    Given the medical theory around breast milk, particularly as articulated by Bartholomeus Anglicus (see above, note 38), from a Dominican point of view, Agnes’s milk might have helped shape her nurslings as potential Christians, and Sarah’s children did, indeed, convert with her. The children—male and female—can be seen as extensions of Agnes’s body, completing the last part of their gestation by drinking the Christian woman’s milk, which continued to form their flesh after its initial establishment in Sarah’s body.

  46.    Steven Justice, “Did the Middle Ages Believe in Their Miracles?” Representations 103 (Summer 2008): 1.

  47.    Sabina Flanagan, Doubt in an Age of Faith: Uncertainty in the Long Twelfth Century (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008), 52. Appeals to the supernatural had a place but were reserved for those cases where other means of settlement were lacking. While, in a private case, a question might be answered by dream, in a criminal legal setting, God’s will must be publicly revealed, and more than one person must be convinced. By the twelfth century, the ordeal was a last resort. Instead, the system favored witnesses, argument, and exculpatory oaths. Lateran IV forbade clerical participation in ordeals. The ordeal was later replaced by judicial torture.

  48.    Sarah Lipton, “Where Are the Gothic Jewish Women? On the Non-Iconography of the Jewess in the Cantigas de Santa Maria,” Jewish History 22, nos. 1/2 (2008): 160.

  49.    Lipton, 139.

  50.    Lipton, 139.

  51.    Lipton, 152.

  52.    Lipton, 139. On similar genderings of Jewishness in modernity see Nadia Valman, “Bad Jew/Good Jewess,” in Philosemitism in History, ed. Jonathan Karp (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 149–69.

  53.    Lipton, 152.

  54.    Miri Rubin notes that the “longstanding habit of identifying the church with Mary” is apparent in architectural programs of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, which often figured Ecclesia and Synagoga as young, beautiful sisters symmetrically placed in cathedral facades. While Ecclesia is often crowned and peaceful, using the visual grammar of representations of Mary, Synagoga is typically depicted as blind and overcome. This oppositional format thus duplicates the contrast between Mary and Jew that Rubin traces. It also, however, connects Mary to the Jewish community through the Pauline metaphor of siblings. See Rubin, Mother of God, 168.

  55.    Examples of such marking of Mary as a Jew in can be found in Adrienne Williams Boyarin’s essay, “Desire for Religion,” 28, including Langland’s description of the Annunciation as “Jhesu Cryste on a Jewes doughter alyghte,” and William of Malmesbury’s statement in his collection of Marian miracles that it would require “a massive book to tell how energetically Mary labors to convert her own people.” Her conversion attempts maintain her connection to the Jewish community even as they provide a means to prove the hardheadedness of Jews who would not listen to one of their own, as one preacher asserted, “þe Iewes had hure, but þei wold not beleue in hure.”

  56.    Theresa Coletti, “Purity and Danger: The Paradox of Mary’s Body and the En-Gendering of the Infancy Narrative in the English Mystery Cycles,” in Feminist Approaches to the Body in Medieval Literature, ed. Linda Lomperis and Sarah Stanbury (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), 66–67, quoted in Lampert, Gender, 55.

  57.    Although the Lucan account of the Annunciation bears much in common with the same author’s depiction of Paul’s conversion in Acts, including a narrative structured by divine visitation, wonder, fear, questioning and acceptance, Mary did not become a type of conversion in medieval Christian thought. Adrienne Williams Boyarin argues that this is in part because development of the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception occluded Marian uncertainty, deliberation, and choice. See Boyarin, “Desire for Religion,” 28.

  58.    Lampert, Gender, 55. Moreover, Lampert notes that there is, in interpretations of the Annunciation, a strong strand in the Christian imagination that sees femininity here converted from carnality to a corporeality that bears the divine. This transition is most typically figured in the exceedingly common trope of Mary as the new Eve. Lampert gives the example of the “Ave Maris Stella,” in which the anagram of Eve and the Ave spoken by Gabriel to Mary is said to “chang[e] Eva’s name.” Lampert, 35.

  59.    The Eucharist gave “sacramental form to Christian unity.” Partaking of the Eucharist identified a person as belonging to the body of faithful and “entailed ceremonial exclusion from the community of those deemed marginal.” Communion thus defined and policed the borders of Christian polity. As testament to this fact, minorities—those who could not occupy a place within Christianitas—experienced intensified violence when there were public celebrations of that Christian unity at festivals including Easter, Christmas, and Corpus Christi. See Michael Goodich, ed., Other Middle Ages: Witnesses at the Margins of Medieval Society (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), 7–8.

  60.    Michel de Certeau, The Mystic Fable, vol. 1, The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, trans. Michael B. Smith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 81.

  61.    Miri Rubin shows the ways in which Marian miracle tales, both those intended for preachers and aristocratic audiences, turned increasingly violent, ending with the execution or expulsion of Jews. There was a move from “Marian inclusion to Marian violence” in much later medieval literature such that, for Chaucer, “Marian piety was a harbinger of violence.” “Mary,” History Workshop Journal 58, no. 1 (2004): 11.

CONCLUSION

    1.    Gregory of Tours, “Liber Vitae Patrum,” in Gregorii Episcopi Turonensis Miracula et Opera Minora, ed. Bruno Krusch and Wilhelm Levison, Monumenta Germaniae Historica: Scriptores Rerum Merovingicarum 1 (Hanover: Hahn, 1969) , vol. 1, part 2, 455.