Promised Bodies: Time, Language, & Corporeality in Medieval Women’S Mystical Texts

WHILE NOT as overtly philosophical as Augustine, nor as explicit as Paul, women’s visionary and mystical texts nevertheless demonstrate a complex temporal interweaving between inner and outer persons and the inner and outer senses that complicates any equation of embodiment with immediacy, mere corporeality, and unmediated experience. Focusing on Hadewijch of Brabant’s Visions, while comparing them with other women’s visionary texts, this chapter traces the temporal and embodied workings of inner and outer persons in visions to show how these are linked to forms of textuality in their participation in the interpretation and application of scripture.

While the point has rightly been made that the visionary activity of medieval women circumvents the question of interpretation of scripture in claiming that visions were received directly from the divine and were therefore not part of a conscious exegetical process (keeping the woman free from charges of preaching), I contend that, despite this claim—while not contradicting it—inner and outer persons participate in processes that are directly involved in understanding (thus interpreting) and applying the wisdom of scripture, even if scripture is not directly cited.1 Although the inner person who participates in the vision may not be attributed to a conscious “self” or to individual agency in the way that we—and medieval clerics—conceive them, and is instead dependent on divine grace, the inner is that part of the visionary that is ascribed to the imago Dei and associated with the promised time of the divine.² As I have shown in the previous chapter, the inner person is an aspect of the human being that is not entirely ascribed to the “self” since it reflects the image of God. The visionary thus avoids the question of exegesis in claiming to merely transcribe the vision: her inner person receives a divine message that will, at some later date, be transformed into a legible medium.³ This message will not spell out its spiritual truth in the same manner as sermons or commentaries, but nevertheless, once communicated in language, it shows what scripture means to the visionary and to the community to which she belongs.

In looking at Hadewijch’s visions, I will show how her representations of inner and outer persons and inner and outer senses perform in temporal and mnemonic ways that derive from Paul and Augustine yet adopt functions closely aligned with the exegetes and commentators on scripture of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries who are also greatly influenced by Origen and his association of the spiritual senses with reading and interpretation.4 In women’s visions, the inner senses, I contend, perceive and read divine truths and navigate the vision like a living text, but in the atemporal moment of divinity. The lesson of the vision, however, does not end there; it must be applied to life—that is, it must be lived and performed by the outer person, and hence translated into the language of lived embodiments.

By comparing the subtle gestures to inner and outer persons in Hadewijch’s Visions with other visionaries such as Hildegard (who is number twenty-eight in Hadewijch’s List of the Perfect, referred to as she who “saw all the visions” [List, 285]), Marguerite d’Oingt, and to a lesser extent, Julian of Norwich, it becomes clearer as to how inner and outer persons operate temporally and textually in women’s visions in embodied ways.⁵ The inner person receives divine grace in the form of a vision that instructs the mystic in several registers. For one, the vision shows in an audiovisual medium how scripture is applied to particulars (like virtue, the Church, the Eucharist, or the role of reason), issues significant to the mystic’s or visionary’s life. Like a movement from the allegorical to the tropological sense, the visions perform a sense of scripture that Jeremy Worthen describes, for Hugh of Saint Victor’s Didascalicon, as one “that speaks of virtue rather than knowledge, the point where the text tells us not just how things are but how we should be; where it makes concrete demands on us, changes us, re-forms us.”⁶ The vision’s portrayal of the inner will therefore also model what the outer person should imitate: the perfected living mirror of the divine. Even though visions—like Hadewijch’s Vision 7 of unity with Christ—may invoke a sensate language that explicitly refers to the registers of inner and outer to confuse the distinctions between the two, it does so with a pedagogical purpose and in a theological framework that defers the sense of immediacy invoked.⁷ The vision will perform how the outer should conform to the inner according to the measure of the divine, affecting the whole human person, in body and soul. The outer person as it figures in the vision demonstrates how the visionary experience will eventually relate to what one would call “real time,” that is, to the body as it is lived and experienced, in the past, present, and future.

I refer to other mystical and visionary texts of the Middle Ages to demonstrate the pervasive influence of Paul and Augustine on women’s visionary practices (although this influence is not the negative one that is so often cited) and the consequences this has for our reading and understanding of embodiment in mystical texts. The language and use of the senses, embodiment, and inner and outer persons is by no means uniform among mystics or visionaries, nor is it, as we have seen, uniform within the works of Paul and Augustine themselves. To address the complex idiom of embodied and sensate language for each author or mystic is an enormous task toward which this book can only gesture. Nevertheless, to first understand the theological and hermeneutic underpinnings of embodiment in women’s visionary and mystical texts on a broader scale—what this chapter aims to do—permits us a better grasp both of the stakes of such a task on an individual level and of how bodily and interpretive practices relate to one another. It also gives us the opportunity to think through the relation of gender to mysticism, an association that has long been celebrated, but often in oversimplified or essentialist ways. When women’s visions seem to promote gendered identifications in reading their own bodily experiences, they recast the body in a larger theological framework—one intimately connected with reading—that impacts the meaning of embodiment itself.

Visions are recognized as the most popular genre for women’s textual composition in the Middle Ages and play a significant part in illuminating the relation of women’s spirituality to textuality, especially after the year 1200. In the early evaluation of this tradition, women’s visions were associated with “oral” as opposed to textual traditions, given their reported reception as auditory and visual events.8 The scholarship of the past twenty years, however, has dramatically revised the ways in which literacy, theology, and spirituality are conceived in relation to women’s spirituality, producing wider and nonoppositional criteria for evaluation: Nicholas Watson’s work on vernacular theology, Mark Amsler’s on affective literacy, Newman’s claim for an “imaginative theology,” and even the notion of “textual communities” as conceived by Brian Stock have all claimed women’s interaction with, not isolation from, religious, political, and literary textual traditions.⁹ Our conceptual models are being dramatically revised in ways that take into account the effect of gender on medieval practices. Hollywood’s and McGinn’s work on the theological significance of women’s mystical texts has weakened the supposition that women’s spirituality is any less theologically complex and original than men’s, giving us further reason to reevaluate how the “theological” is expressed. Susan Boynton’s emphasis on liturgical knowing and the experience of “performative exegesis” broadens the way we conceive of exegesis in relation to liturgical practices—practices essential for understanding women’s access to scriptural texts and that merit further exploration.

This chapter explores visionary and mystical texts and how they are involved in hermeneutic traditions and practices that extend to both genders, yet manifest an embodied poetics that characterizes women’s mystical and visionary writings. Once we understand the broader theological investment that links the body to textuality, we can turn back to women’s texts to reconsider the idiom of embodiment deployed by each mystical text, how and why the language of embodiment connects to her Christic mission in nuanced theological ways, and ultimately, the ramifications this has on what we think of as “the body.” For Hadewijch, because visions represent, as I will show, a first step in her spirituality—and not the final step—they allow us to better grasp how embodiment as it is represented functions in the larger perspective of her theological views, often representing the promise of union of the outer person and the inner person, or outer senses and inner senses, precisely where it seems most tantalizingly immediate.

In the works of Hadewijch, the registers of inner and outer are expressed in several ways, even referring directly to the Pauline “earthly man” (ertschen man) of 1 Corinthians 15:47, once in Letter 22, referring to the fruition one can have of God without elevation (l. 69), and twice in her third Mengeldicht (ll. 98, 103), referring to how a person may “wear the earthly man as a garment” in the hopes of human unity with the divine.10 At several points in her work Hadewijch names the inner senses (inneghen sinnen) as such, but more often she refers to the two registers in adjectival or adverbial form (van binnen and van buten).¹¹ Although Hadewijch is less interested in mapping out the anthropology associated with the inner and outer or in theorizing the relation of one to the other, she does, nevertheless, make use of these designations in ways that reveal theological and hermeneutic orientations. Her visions constantly refer to the inner orientation of her person and the focus on being taken up in the spirit. Vision 1 paradigmatically begins: “I felt such an attraction of my spirit inwardly [van binnen van minen gheeste]” (CW, 263); and Vision 3, “After, one Easter Sunday, I had gone to God; and he embraced me in my interior senses [Ende Hi ontfinc mi van binnen mine sinne]” (CW, 272); Vision 4, “Then during the Epistle my senses were drawn inwards [Doe worden mi binnen der epistolen mine sinne binnen ghetrect] with a great tempestuous clamor” (CW, 273).¹² Hadewijch’s referencing the domains of inner and outer is aligned with the hermeneutic nature of these designations, common to her theological milieu. Her more obvious invocation of the senses (of taste, touch, sight, smell, and hearing) is widespread in her works and seems to appeal to the immediate, but again, the theological context has to be taken into account for a proper measure of what “immediacy” means in relation to embodiment and the divine.¹³

Letter 22, which comments on various verses of 1 Corinthians, makes explicit Hadewijch’s Augustinian orientation. Hadewijch names Augustine when referring to the human limitations of knowing and speaking of God and demonstrates a fidelity to her source as well as an embellishment characteristic of the spiritual currents of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.¹⁴ She begins with sound Augustinian premises, echoing Augustine’s limits of the outer senses: “‘He who knows little can say little’: so says wise Augustine. This is my case, God knows. I believe and hope greatly in God, but my knowledge of him is small. I can guess only a little of the riddle of God; for men cannot grasp him with human senses [menschen sinnen]” (CW, 94).¹⁵ She then continues in a manner that will resound with the Victorine and Cistercian schools, themselves echoing Origen: “But one who was touched in his soul by God could show something of him for those who understood this [touch] with their soul. Enlightened reason interprets a little of God to the inner senses [den inneghen sinnen], whereby they can know that God in his wondrousness is an alarming and fearfully sweet Nature to behold and that he is all things to all, and wholly in all” (CW, 94).¹⁶ In this passage, Hadewijch highlights the inner way of approaching God, by means of the inner senses and the rational soul. She emphasizes what she calls the touch (gherinen) of God in the soul and the roles of understanding, reason, and beholding (contemplation) in a form of comprehension that is primarily given by grace.¹⁷ If one understands this “touch” with the soul, she contends, what is given by the divine may be interpreted by reason for the inner senses. The inner senses then contemplate this “little” bit of God and put it to use by subsuming knowing to a way of loving God.¹⁸

In her last vision, Vision 14, Hadewijch clarifies the synesthetic nature of taste and refers to a person “tast[ing] Man and God in one knowledge [eenre const], what no man could do unless he were as God, and wholly such as he was who is our Love” (CW, 305).19 In this brief but spectacular phrase, Hadewijch shows us the paradox and secret of taste’s immediacy: taste harbors a quasi-tautological nature in that it confirms one’s hidden likeness to and immersion in the divine, even when taste lacks a concrete material object in the time of life. As one’s inner person becomes more and more substantial and transforms one’s outer person, one may “taste” the divine.

All of these processes reflect an ordering of the inner based on the model of a Trinitarian mirroring. In the passage just cited from Letter 22, Hadewijch echoes, in the language of the inner, a Trinitarian ordering made explicit in 1 Corinthians 15:27–28: “For he hath put all things under his feet. But when he saith, all things are put under him, it is manifest that he is excepted, which did put all things under him. And when all things shall be subdued unto him, then shall the Son also himself be subject unto him that put all things under him, that God may be all in all.” Just as each part of the Trinity is subjected to the whole, so too does the inner require the subjection of reason and understanding to Love itself. In order for the soul to understand the “touch” of the divine, it must order itself as a divine mirror and become what it contemplates.

The content of Hadewijch’s visions will represent these teachings in other figurative ways. In Vision 9, for example, the relation between reason and love is illuminated, with reason assuming the personified form of a queen inspiring the fear of God in Hadewijch’s soul (“to behold God’s alarming and fearfully sweet nature” as described in Letter 22 [CW, 94]).²⁰ In Vision 9, Queen Reason initially puts her feet on Hadewijch’s neck, subduing her in bodily fashion. Then, once the “I” of Hadewijch’s vision shows that her soul is properly ordered, she overcomes Queen Reason through love. Their relationship reverses, and Queen Reason is subject to Hadewijch as she reflects on what she learns in the vision with wisdom and love. The dramatic reenactment of inner ordering in the vision anticipates the contemplative work Hadewijch must do in life. The vision is a “touch” of the divine; it is an act of grace that provides for “a little of God” to be made manifest and interpreted. Hadewijch’s emphasis on understanding, interpreting, and beholding makes it clear that her mysticism, while affective, understands itself as performing tasks that are by no means the product of the “immediate.” While the vision does not provide a concrete manner of “knowing” that conforms to the human senses, it does enable an understanding of the divine.

Hadewijch places a high value on her visions, especially their importance for perfecting her person and guiding her community.21 As Veerle Fraeters and Paul Mommaers have shown, the Visions operate pedagogically in ordered fashion, moving in sequence from a less learned state to a more perfected state, suggesting that they were read as one unit, guiding the visionary and reader toward increasing perfection.²² Like Paul and Augustine’s promised face-to-face encounter with the divine, Hadewijch’s visions promise unity in various temporal and material registers, showing the heights of perfection to which humans may aspire. As instruments for reading and teaching, her visions illustrate how scripture is read and applied to life, emphasizing the final form of spirituality—like Richard of Saint Victor’s fourth degree of love—in which she descends from the lofty likeness of the soul with the divine (in the third degree) to conform to the humility of Christ, finding her own conformity to God in his humanity.²³ Representations of embodiments associated with inner and outer in her visions will likewise reflect unity and perfection, but in less obvious ways.

Hadewijch’s Vision 8—which, with Vision 7, constitutes one vision in the manuscript—reenacts the wisdom gained from Romans 8:37–39, in which all divisions are united in God through love. The vision begins with Hadewijch’s much-touted unity with Christ and the Eucharist, then proceeds to show how all realms find their unity in God through love through five different ways of loving, one of which is reserved for Hadewijch alone. The vision ends with a command to Hadewijch, highlighted at the beginning of this chapter, by a figure described as a champion (kimpe): “Return into your material [materie] and let your works blossom forth” (CW, 284).²⁴ This command, as insignificant as it may seem, will serve to illuminate how domains associated with the body and soul shift between temporal registers associated with the human and the divine. To begin, the meaning seems easy enough to follow. Columba Hart translates it: “Return again into your material being and let your works blossom forth.” Or one could simply say, “Return to your material and let your works blossom forth.” Vision 6 ends similarly on the note of “return” when Hadewijch says that she returned, “woeful, to myself” (CW, 280).²⁵

The motion described is familiar to mystics as well as to visionaries in general: visions start by signaling a movement from the human body toward the soul. As with the writings of many visionaries, a number of Hadewijch’s visions begin with an account of physical suffering, only for her to then be “taken up” in the spirit. The materie, in the context of the quotation cited above, is associated with Hadewijch’s human materiality, the materiality of the temporal human body or flesh. This embodiment is what I associate with what I am calling the “outer body,” the Pauline exo anthropos (what she calls the “earthly man,” ertschen man) or the Augustinian exterior homo, especially when Hadewijch is performing works.

Hadewijch’s designation of materie is unusual. One would expect the term lichame to be used to refer to the body per se, but Hadewijch, as I will show, reserves that term to talk about the glorified body as it conforms to Christ. Hadewijch employs the term materie to designate the materiality of her “earthly” person, which will also be associated with the materie of Minne, inasmuch as it manifests the ways in which human beings conform to Christ through love. The werke (works) of “let your works blossom forth” are her active (and virtuous) deeds as a Beguine, acts that will enable the conformity of her outer person (and thus her material body) with the promised spiritual body. Works reorient the outer person and its embodiment, subsuming it to the guidance of the soul. These “works” could even symbolically include the composing of her visions, letters, and songs, as they are all pedagogical tools designed to instruct and perfect individuals in their humanity.

The lichame of Hadewijch’s visions thus reflects the promised imago Dei in that it refers to her future perfected body, which will unite body and soul, transforming the material body into a spiritual one. As it figures in the vision, Hadewijch’s lichame represents the corporeal element of the inner person, the embodiment of her soul. Hadewijch’s lichame is pictured in the celebrated Vision 7 in a seemingly erotic union with Christ, performing the union promised to all who conform themselves to his likeness, when they “are one without difference” (CW, 281).26 Despite the obvious commitment of Hadewijch’s visions to the soul and its reflection of the divine, their beginnings and endings are often marked by the outer body: physical pain, trembling, affective states, or mere awareness of a departure or return to her self, often in the middle of the liturgy.

What then are we to make of the presence of the outer material body in the visionary text? What purpose might it serve, if any? The formal transition in her visions from this external narrative frame (the sign of the outer) to the vision itself (the domain of the inner) and back again will, I will demonstrate, provide a model for dwelling with other human beings, like those in her community of beguines, as well as a model for how the human is inhabited by the divine. As with Paul and Augustine, the outer is a vessel for the inner, a means for inhabiting the world as one inhabits a text (visionary or scriptural). This is not to say that all medieval religious women were reading Augustinian and Pauline texts, hoping to put them to work in their contemplative or active lives.27 On the contrary, medieval mystics did not need to read Paul or Augustine, as they were cited and incorporated into the traditions that oriented exegesis, monastic life, and medieval spirituality in general.

The temporal transitions between outer and inner bodies help us understand how visions are associated with the modeling of community. Temporally, Hadewijch’s visions move from a historical or liturgical time shared by a community—Hadewijch’s Vision 9 begins, “It was at Matins on the feast In nativitate beatae Mariae, and after the third lesson” (CW, 285)²⁸—the time in which her materie dwells, to a divine atemporal moment available to the lichame, that aspect of the human being that renews itself according to the imago Dei and is promised a measure of eternal life. Whether explicitly or not, a vision then returns to the time of the outer body, implied if nothing else by the narrativization of the vision itself. Any account of embodiment in Hadewijch (and, by extension, visionaries in general) must contend with how these two embodiments and times relate.

What is seemingly absent from the vision—the outer body, or materie—plays a significant role in the textual reconstruction of the vision, for the vision frames the material of humanity in the light of the inner person, which we saw was so critical to Augustine, in order to receive and understand divine forms and spiritual truths. Although for Hadewijch, the outer materiality is marginalized—engaged only at the beginning and the end of the vision—removed from the divine vision’s focus on the soul and access to divine truths, her materie figures significantly in the vision and in its afterlife. Just as Hadewijch returns to her materie, so too do the spiritual truths glimpsed in the vision reach the outer person once the vision is put into language. In the vision, multiple registers associated with reading occur in one narrative: spiritual truths are beheld, contemplated, interpreted, and read in order to eventually provide a prescription for Hadewijch’s performance of werke (works). As privileged as the lichame and soul are for Hadewijch in the visions, it is through the outer person and its transformation by means of Christic works that Hadewijch may perfect the inner body and soul, ultimately conforming her materie into a spiritual body.

In the visions of women as temporally, geographically, linguistically, and textually distinct from one another as Hadewijch of Brabant, Gertrude of Helfta, Julian of Norwich, Marguerite d’Oingt, Ida of Louvain, Angela of Foligno, Hildegard von Bingen, and Saint Theresa of Avila, how the feminine body relates to the divine message it receives is habitually highlighted in relation to an accompanying textual event, yet the body’s temporal complexity in relation to the vision is seldom addressed by scholars. As a kind of annunciatory host, surprised and startled by the message it bears, the material body often assumes an intimate yet incommensurate quality in the context of the vision, given the vision’s divine source. Poised in chronological time, yet pointing to an event that exceeds its historical moment, the outer body allows human time to relate to its divine underpinnings (according to an Augustinian logic) and incorporate the sense of the divine into a temporalized hermeneutic.

In her Vita, compiled by the monks Gottfried of Saint Disiboden and Theoderic of Echternach although supposedly reported by Hildegard herself, the visionary Hildegard constantly relates the state of her body to the receiving and recounting of her visions.29 She states, “Some time later I saw an extraordinary mystical vision, at which all my inward parts trembled,” or, earlier on in the Vita, she reports: “Then in this same vision I was constrained by the great pressure of my pains to reveal openly what I had seen and heard.”³⁰ Even more explicitly in her Scivias, her delay is linked to her lack of trust in human language:

But I though I saw and heard these things, I refused to write for a long time through doubt and bad opinion and the diversity of human words, not with stubbornness but in the exercise of humility, until laid low by the scourge of God, I fell upon a bed of sickness; then, compelled at last by many illnesses. … I set my hand to the writing. … And again I heard a voice from Heaven saying to me, “Cry out therefore, and write thus!”³¹

(SCIVIAS, 60)

The incommensurability of Hildegard’s outer body to the divine is a source of temporal and ontological paradox (and of physical pain) with respect to the eternal message it delivers. While the message received is itself an atemporal divine truth, it must become temporalized when put into language and transmitted in time, despite any qualms about the inadequacy of language and of one’s humanity. Likewise, while the message is “in” her, it is not “of” her, displacing the sense of the subject of the vision and the agency at work. Hildegard instrumentalizes the receiving of her visions and describes her activity in understandably elusive terms that problematize outer perception itself: “She lives and does not live, she perceives the things formed of dust and does not perceive them, and utters God’s miracles not of herself but being touched by them, even as a string touched by a lutanist emits a sound not of itself but by his touch.”33 For Hildegard, the outer material body becomes thematized as part of the apparatus of vision itself, but is not the heart of its subject matter. In the composition of the vision—that is, in its narrative framing—the outer body is taken as a sign and finds a value in its signifying capacity, able to be read and understood in relation to the message it delivers. Often stimulated by visual or aural signs (like Julian’s focus on the cross), the visionary text effectuates a turn inward from external to internal senses, moving from a phrase or object perceived (or an external sickness, like Julian’s) to its figural and spiritual meaning.³⁴

What we traditionally see encountered by men and some monastic women through the acts of meditation, commentary, ruminatio, or lectio, we see Hadewijch and other visionaries confront in less rigidly defined visual figurations of the mind that frequently work through the meaning and means of an embodied response.³⁵ Hadewijch’s visions should therefore not be read as an ideal encounter with the divine that excludes an embodied counterpoint in life, but as an exegetic and pedagogic tool that indicates a means for the vision’s spiritual properties to become embodied in language and in works. The consequences of this lived exegesis are also material, in that the body is no longer just a body but is also a signifying text—attempting to conform itself to Christ, that is, the Word. Just as the Pauline texts insist on the conformity of the outer person to the inner person, so too do the visions attempt to demonstrate how to reform both inner and outer persons in the image of the divine. Hadewijch reports on a vision in Letter 28: “I saw God was God, and man was man, and then it did not astonish me that God was God, and that man was man. Then I saw God was Man, and I saw that man was Godlike [godlec]. Then it did not astonish me that man was blissful with God” (CW, 113).³⁶ The narrative of the visionary moment is itself one means of becoming embodied, that is, of providing analogues for scriptural and liturgical texts.

The vision proceeds according to an imaginative spatialization of meaning and figures, as though textual meaning were being encountered spatially and bodily, yet in an atemporal register.37 In Vision 1, Hadewijch notes, “When I had received Our Lord, he then received me to him, so that he withdrew my senses from [alle mine sine buten] every remembrance of foreign things to enable me to have fruition [ghebrukene] in him in oneness [enecheden] with him. Then I was led as if into a meadow, an expanse that was called the space of perfect virtue” (CW, 263).³⁸ Hadewijch’s imaginative image of virtue is connected to a narrative encounter, with its representation as meadow and forest.³⁹ However allegorical, the forest is connected to the reality of the inner person as it understands and interprets the link between virtue and piety. In Vision 7, as she is told by a great eagle to prepare herself for oneness, she responds in terms that perform the outer gestures of humility, “I fell on my knees and my heart beat fearfully, to worship the Beloved with oneness” (CW, 281).⁴⁰

Hadewijch’s vision of unity is represented as an encounter with meaning that fuses bodily and spiritual registers through an affective understanding. The images encountered provide a medium for reflecting the inner person’s experience of scripture and model how she should externally conform to its divine origins. As Fraeters notes, Hadewijch’s collection of visions “is in fact an alternative form of experiential scriptural exegesis.”⁴¹ As with Bernard’s liber experientiae, the mystic treats the vision as an experience that makes manifest scriptural truths. Far from being disembodied, the vision stages a moment of textual exegesis that is inextricable from its translation into embodied forms, eventually written into the material of life. As Jennifer Summit has demonstrated for medieval women, reading and textual production are closely intertwined, making devotional reading “an active process that enlisted the reader as the co-creator of meaning.”⁴²

Visions transpose an encounter with textuality into imaginative terms, fusing text, image, and oral delivery into sight and sound. Hildegard sketches out her visions’ relation to textuality, writing, “The brightness that I see is not placed, yet it is far, far more lucent than a cloud that envelops the sun. I cannot contemplate the height or length or width in it; and I call it ‘the shadow of the living brightness.’ And as sun, moon, and stars appear in water, so scriptures, sermons, virtues, and some works of men take form for me and are reflected radiant in this brightness” (Dronke, Women Writers of the Middle Ages, 168, 252).⁴³ For Hildegard, writings or sermons are envisioned as quasi-animate forms that appear in a different space for her to read and transmit in oral and textual form. Despite their ephemeral nature, they attest to a lived form of textuality. The mystic’s inner and outer persons become effective hermeneutic means for encountering, meditating on, understanding, and living scripture. The activity of vision, “which is that very understanding, which is the soul,” as William of Saint Thierry notes, may already be a form of interpretive comprehension. Scripture is transposed or reflected into interpreted forms that are seen and heard, hence reading becomes transposed into a listening and figural seeing.⁴⁴

As D. H. Green has shown, “Even if [women readers were] uneducated and unable to read [a text] in the literal sense,” this kind of visual or aural reading entailed a form of devotional literacy, for “in devotional and mystical literature, especially popular with women, Christ’s crucified body is seen as a book to be read by those who have acquired the grammar and syntax not of school-based literacy but of this type of meditation.”45 Unlike many in their communities, visionaries and mystics like Hildegard and Hadewijch are literate in that they are able to read written works even if they do not have the scholastic training of men. Hadewijch’s works incorporate variations of reading practices common both to medieval women and to male commentators, preachers, theologians, poets, and philosophers. Wybren Scheepsma has underscored the literary orientation of women in Hadewijch’s milieu, especially in their role as readers, noting that “writing was [most often] for educated men, in other words, the clergy. But women were then, as now, the greatest consumers of literature, for reading was seen as a feminine occupation par excellence.”⁴⁶

Understanding the blend in Hadewijch’s visionary texts of forms of reading and how they produce writing—in the text as well as in life, through the body—allows us a more thorough evaluation of the literary qualities in women’s visionary and mystical works, however differently from each other they may speak. Following Hollywood’s argument in relation to Hadewijch’s work and mysticism as a whole, as readers, we should look at how the text invokes similar content to that of their male counterparts but by different means. While a visionary may be denied the ability to interpret scripture and teach, the divine that speaks through her by means of grace is able to teach both the visionary herself and her community. In the vision, the divine teaches the visionary or mystic and does so through scriptural commentary and figures of embodied learning. The body and letter are involved in a poetic work that negotiates the prohibition against scriptural interpretation in the guise of scriptural application.⁴⁷ Scripture is applied to the understanding of the inner and outer persons and is a force for refiguring one in the promise of the other.

In a graphic rendering of reading that vividly enacts this transformation of words and textuality to inner and outer bodies, the Carthusian prioress Marguerite d’Oingt recounts a vision (the Speculum) that constantly intertwines life, text, body, mind, and textual script, demonstrating how one bears upon the other.48 As Stephanie Paulsell has noted, paying close attention to Marguerite’s Carthusian inheritance, in this vision, Marguerite follows Guigo I, for whom “listening is a form of reading,” and she transcribes her vision accordingly.⁴⁹ Engaging in what Paulsell cleverly calls scriptio divina, Marguerite conjoins reading, experience, writing, and contemplation in a way that celebrates the activity of writing as part of her ascent.⁵⁰

Using a third-person voice, and writing in her vernacular Franco-Provençal, she envisions the outside and inside of a book in relation to the temporal and eternal nature of the body of Christ. She reads and contemplates black, white, red, and gold letters on the outside of the book, which symbolically point to various aspects of the historical life of Christ. Once she has studied these letters and their significance, she reads “the book of her conscience” (“el livro de sa concienci”) and compares this with the “book” she has just read of Christ, discerning by comparison the “falsity and lies” (“fouceta et de menconges”) that adorn her book.⁵¹ She then uses the example of the good book to try to “correct” her faults, and thus “amend[s] her life, based on the example of this book” (“illi ot bien emenda sa via, a l’essimplario de cel livro”).⁵² Once she has done so, after “a long time” of meditation (“illi se estudiavet grant teins”), the divine book finally opens in a vision, and she is allowed to contemplate the pure and glorious body of Christ in the two pages that open up to her like a mirror.⁵³ The body of Christ she is then allowed to see is the redeemed body and is “so transparent that one could clearly see the soul inside of it” (“si trapercans que l’on veoyt tot clarament l’arma per dedenz”), thereby becoming a model for the promised body that one hopes to mirror and see face-to-face “when our souls leave our bodies” (“quant les armes nos partirent del cors”).⁵⁴

Marguerite’s clearly delineated vision of inner and outer persons and their embodiments corresponds with her reading of the outer suffering of Christ in his temporal life and the (inner) eternity of his glorified body, which has now become what Paul calls a spiritual body (in 1 Cor 15:44). The first allows her to “see” and “read” her own external faults, and the second allows her to mirror the purity and desired perfection of her soul, in the hopes that she too can imitate the promised body of Christ. In this sense, the vision enacts a desired correlation between the Word, the means whereby its graphic rendering and meaning are perceived and read, and the significance for inner and outer bodies. The vision finds its mimetic property—its capacity for true representation—in understanding and portraying the relation of bodily and written forms to spiritual sense. Her outer body is one of the means through which she enacts a kind of reform: she literally re-forms it to Christ’s life and example as glimpsed in the vision (through her mind), and shapes her temporal existence to reflect the inner virtues that Christ embodies, as though she were engaged with the tropological sense of scripture. Reading and meditating on her own vision engenders a bridge between inner and outer bodies; it renders them coherent, in touch with one another. The vision anticipates the unity of inner and outer bodies in and through divinity itself. As she meditates on the spiritual meaning of what she sees over time, this allows her inner person to become increasingly substantial (in the symbolic and literal sense) and adapted to its desired role, enabling her to live the way she reads.

Visionaries such as Marguerite and Hadewijch are involved in a kind of visual or affective meditatio, what Barbara Newman describes as an “imaginative theology,” yet the “imaginative” content of a vision is anchored in very concrete, text-specific forms of connecting word, meaning, and spirit to the mirroring quality of the mind.55 This connection is then reflected onto inner and outer persons. Many visionaries are not shown the first sense of reading, the literal sense; rather, they are engaged with the highest senses of scripture, what male religious call the allegorical and tropological senses.

The more closely the outer body conforms to a linguistic referent, the more united and perfect it becomes. The inner body becomes more substantial as it approximates the living substance of consciousness. The link between lectio–meditatio–oratio–operatio and contemplatio seen in the Victorines, Cistercians, and Carthusians is elucidated in Marguerite’s case in terms of how inner and outer relate to one another. The fourth term, operatio (work, performance), is the ultimate sign of her perfection. Although terms for reading are not systematically employed, the activities involved in the vision (of beholding, reflecting, contemplating) are nevertheless imitated and applied to the imagined reception of a text. For Marguerite—as for many mystics, including Hadewijch—reading and being ideally become one, hence the outer person and the corresponding embodiment, often portrayed in women’s visionary texts as synonymous with carnality, desire, and immediacy, are actually part of a larger script that defers the sense of the outer person to the inner person who animates it.

Marguerite may be the mystic who thematizes textuality more than others, yet she exemplifies a process that underlies visions whether or not reference is made to a book, since all visions illustrate some relation to textuality, especially scripture and the texts visions are intended to produce. As Marguerite makes evident, the meaning of the text is also associated with the development of the inner body, and with the faculties associated with that development, such as the will. In one letter—in which Marguerite recounts contemplating the word “vehement” (vehemens) after hearing it and then sensing its being written on her heart—she envisions a tree with five branches, with Latin words inscribed on the leaves and one branch for each of the inner senses (visu, auditu, gustu, odoratu, tactu).56 Once the senses honor their spiritual author, inverting and pointing to the sky rather than to the temporal ground, they transform from dried and downward bent to “all green and full of leaves,” thus reflecting the true life and source of true meaning.⁵⁷ The inner senses, represented as they are in Latin terms, reflect a fusion of exegetical sensitivity and spiritual growth (and not uniquely a tie to carnality). In her vision, Marguerite reads the Latin terms, and as she reads and contemplates their meaning, she witnesses the representation of the inner senses flourish.⁵⁸ Contemplation thus generates the living substance of the inner senses, when the soul finds and is nourished on its true source. Visionaries then are readers of a different sort in that they envision and encounter spiritual meaning in the inner senses and transcribe it or reflect it onto the outer person in the hope of a promised unity.

While the outer person remains at the cusp of the vision, like the cover of Marguerite’s book, the inner person and inner senses are at work within the vision, perceiving and receiving divine messages and forms as if written directly into the soul itself. Even in the case of a later mystic like Julian, the words she receives are, she says, formed by God’s writing directly on her soul: “Then [God], without voys and opening of lippes, formed in my soule these wordes.”⁵⁹ What is formed in the soul passes into textual form by way of exteriorization. Critical to the visionary process, the outer body is both host and hostage to a message that issues from a divine source and that must pass into language, often through bodily pressure and pains. The visions thus seem to always in some way be contingent on embodiment (such as through a sensation of touch, pain, pleasure, a turning toward the inner senses, or an experience of the humanity of Christ in the imitatio Christi), which they register as both a corporeal and a linguistic event.⁶⁰ One means of bridging these two bodies is through memory, both cognitive and embodied.

The corporeal and linguistic registers are, as I have argued, linked to inner and outer persons and promise to come together in the mystical and visionary text through a complex interweaving of moments. While the inner person may seem the more immediately tied to the linguistic, the lessons learned about the soul must be applied and lived, shaping the outer person into a likeness of the Word. The various moments culminate in an embodied and temporal fugue, each person and time overlapping the other, in the other, and articulating itself through the other, through the mind’s reflection and through the composition of the text.

As I have stressed, the Augustinian and Pauline conception of two different kinds of time is expressed in mystical texts: the form of time linked to the outer person and the human faculties of perception is chronological, or historical, time; the other form of time (or lack thereof) is an atemporal, or eternal, moment, a time outside of time, the time of God, which is not subject to change or to mediation and remains identical with itself, inaccessible to humans directly. This latter time is, however, the source from which divine truths issue and are received by the inner senses. While divinity, as Augustine points out, is conceivable as a word that precedes language, humans are, of course, bound to the temporal and to language, unceasingly perfecting their relation to language and embodiment in order to become closer to the Word itself. Human existence is necessarily mediated by time, and thus it can only aspire to the promise of eternal salvation or union via memory and the hope of an afterlife. While the inner senses might perceive and register a divine truth, it is memory that is called upon to put the vision into language, mediating between the sense of an atemporal moment and its exteriorized transmission into language.

Memory—both somatic and mental—is the key to the mystic text’s taking shape. While mysticism, like Christianity, is a religion of remembrance and is clearly involved in various positive mnemonic processes (detailed by Mary Carruthers) the innermost memory that the mystics call upon differs in kind from substantive memories and is closest to Augustine’s memory of the divine, which involves a memory of an unlived experience.61 In the Confessions, most notably, Augustine searches for the divine in life and in the stores of memory, and finds an experience of God’s absence in his life (there but unnoticed, unrecognized, and only known retroactively in the life of his soul), yet immemorially present and sought after through memory and confession. Augustine’s text hovers between these two poles, seeking and affirming divinity through his faith and attestation and rewriting memories that are time-based (anchored in biography) with a memory that is above and beyond time and experience itself.

This latter kind of memory-without-content, linked to the imago Dei, the image of God within, has no positivistic content from which it can know itself as true; it can only anchor itself in times and experiences that are known and posit divinity as a ubiquitous absent presence, unable to be placed in any one location but potentially immanent in all.62 This memory is not Augustine’s proper, but rather the memory of God in him (in the objective genitive), which he attempts to cultivate through love and understanding. Like a postmemory—that is, a memory that is not directly gained from experience, but is issued from a time that precedes the individual—this memory is issued from the Trinity itself and from previous generations of commentaries on scripture.⁶³ Augustine’s memory of divinity is unlived, as it is not an object of and for experience, not attested to in any positivistic way, but rather is rendered present only through language, through his confession in the form of a promised likeness of its truer source. A memory without content that promises a truer form of itself in a future face-to-face encounter: this is a temporal peculiarity both of mystical texts and of Augustine’s writings.

Because of this fundamental difference between the memory of God and the human desire to find him, a similar rhythm of searching for God haunts Hadewijch. The desire to find God is affirmed in faith, but in human life the desire for the divine falls short of its object. Confession can never ultimately find its object; rather, the search for the object becomes the only tangible attestation of its existence. The inadequacy of confession to recapture the divine (even if this is the only way to “remember” it) finds a parallel in Hadewijch in her feelings about the inadequacy of loving Minne enough and the relentless nature of the pursuit. Language too furthers the dissimilarity, as it does in Augustine’s regio dissimilitudinis (region of unlikeness). In Letter 28, “a soul” paradoxically explains, “And since I feel with God in God, that nothing separates me more from him than having to speak, for this reason I keep silence” (CW, 113).⁶⁴

While Hadewijch’s unlived experience is linked to an elusive event, her contact with or proximity to the divine nevertheless occurs within the framework of a specific date. Beginning at a precise moment in time, the mystic’s soul is taken out of herself and enveloped in a moment outside of chronological time.⁶⁵ “I was taken up in the spirit on the feast of Saint John the Evangelist in the Christmas Octave” (CW, 287), says Hadewijch at the opening of Vision 10.⁶⁶ As a kind of temporal parenthesis or enclave, bounded by a “departure” and “return” to the outer body, this instance is never recounted in the present tense or in the first person as it happens, nor is it attributable to the power of the mystic herself. The atemporal enclave functions as a memory of unity, eclipsed by consciousness, yet recalled through a Trinitarian focus in the soul that will haunt the mystic in life. Like Augustine’s confession, the experience of the divine is unlived, but the memory of the divine as it manifests itself in the vision will become the means for a patterning to reflect the imago in life. Memory and imitatio are thus bound together, allowing for the mystic’s pursuit of a face-to-face encounter to prefigure (in the Auerbachian sense) the imitatio required in life.

In a manner that will influence Hadewijch, William of Saint Thierry links memory to a spiritual form of affective piety, that is, to a continued effort at purification in order to become like the Trinitarian image through love. “Seeking the face of God,” he writes, requires a form of piety and affective memory: “This piety is the continual remembrance of God, an unceasing effort of the mind to know him, an unwearied concern of the affections to love him, so that, I will not say every day, but every hour finds the servant of God occupied in the labor of ascesis and the effort to make progress, or in the sweetness of experience and the joy of fruition.”67 Continued remembrance is an hourly event—a temporal habit that Hadewijch will elaborate on even further in her constant references to “hours” (ure)—but it is a remembrance of what one already is in potential but is not yet fully in life, hence the unlived nature of that memory, even when it transpires in a vision.⁶⁸ While Hadewijch can affectively and spiritually feel and anticipate the content of spiritual truths and experience “sweetness” (a substantive truth), she does not fully possess or identify with what the vision reflects.

Even when the outer person is pushed to conform to the inner person, to become like the imago Dei, the perfection it seeks is always futural. If, however, the outer person approximates perfection, this may make for a saint, or a perfect life (to be recounted by a hagiographer), but not the body of divinity itself. The divine is reflected through the work or body of the saint or martyr, but is not identical to the saint or martyr. Their humanity remains intact while divinity works through them.⁶⁹ The mystic lives the promise of unity, the unity as promise; she archives a unity that once exceeded her and that she seeks once more to become. The memory that is called upon to resuscitate and bind together these times will be a unifying feature in assembling the different components of the text.

When Hadewijch initiates her Vision 12—“On an Epiphany, during Mass, I was taken outside myself in the spirit” (CW, 293)—this instance, which is embedded in historical time, works according to a liturgical or datable calendar and can be situated within a historical period or cycle.70 At the same time, it directs us to an interruption of its domain in favor of the spirit, what Hadewijch and other mystics can only access via the inner person, made more tangible through the work of the divine office.⁷¹ Hadewijch refers to this time in which the spirit is taken up in the divine the “nameless” or “unnamed” (onghemende) hours, hours that are distinct from “named” liturgical hours. In her Lied 5, she will refer to a person’s “tasting” the nameless hours when Minne touches her, presumably when she is experiencing rapture or the ecstasy of union in the time of the vision.⁷² In calling them “unnamed,” she may be alluding to how these “hours” mark a limit of speech in which it attempts to approximate—but falls short of—the divine.⁷³ While human knowledge and language cannot directly access this temporality, those who have been “cast into the abyss of Minne’s strong nature, or those who are fitted to be cast into it” can achieve some form of inner understanding (which will play an important role in the production of works and a text). Hadewijch nevertheless specifies that such people are merely structurally fitted to Minne, for “these last rather believe in Minne than understand her” (CW, 93).⁷⁴

The liturgy enacts a reorganization of the human experience of time through cyclical forms of spiritual recall and trains the body to voice the words of the spirit and to host the divine language that passes through it. In so doing, it prompts Hadewijch to leave her materie for the performative enactment of scriptural exegesis hosted in her lichame, in the voice and time of divinity (and Minne).⁷⁵ The structural work of the liturgy, its reconfiguration of time and of the orientation of the body, parallels and foreshadows the hours of Minne and its work in the soul, deepening the devotee’s performative and cognitive proximity to the divine. The named ure (hours) of the liturgy cast human time in the form of the divine through a complex network of visual and textual figuration.⁷⁶ The visions likewise perform a kind of figurative and ruminative work through images and text, and do so through twelve kinds of ure, as her twentieth letter makes clear. Unlike the liturgy’s anticipated and regular times, the visions often occur violently or unexpectedly to the mystic or visionary and happen to the seer in a way that supersedes will or any preparedness.⁷⁷

The “once” that marks the vision, the “on x day” or “on y feast,” the instance that inscribes, fissures, or punctuates historical time—this is the trace of the incision of a different temporality. This incision is a cut that marks the wounding of the text (and the body), there where it is open to a poetic force that exceeds its date.⁷⁸ The composing of the text seeks to bind together into unified form the incision of the atemporal and the fabric of the everyday. In this sense, the form of the text itself promises unity there where experience can only anticipate or elliptically recollect. In the register of historical time, this unlived experience continues to haunt the mystic, often in the somatic form of bodily pain, and assumes a structure similar to that of the unassimilated memory of a traumatic event. The body’s pain or even the body’s memory of passing away into blissful indistinction carries within it the force of recall of what the soul could not sustain, that is, the affective and spiritual “overflow” of divine essence, what Hadewijch calls the “abyss,” at the moment of the vision itself.

For Hadewijch, Hildegard, and Julian, among others, the writing of the visions is delayed. Infusing the young soul, the visions take on a force that the mystic will continue to draw upon to orient her spiritual growth. As happened in Augustine’s estranging initial encounters with scripture—although in a manner no way as (guiltily) disdainful—the mystic will not fully understand the vision as it will transcend her spiritually as well as physically. Like a traumatic event, the force of Minne and of vision overwhelms; in a letter Hadewijch recalls, “Since I was ten years old I have been so overwhelmed by intense love that I should have died, during the first two years when I began this” (CW, 69).79 Like the wounding nature of traumatic experience, the visitation of the divine is silenced for lengths of time and is not fully understood when it happens.⁸⁰

For the mystic, the vision’s accrual of meaning gestates over time along with spiritual growth and understanding yet is never completely understood in time, as this would imply a total identification with its source. Christ reassures Beatrice of Ornacieux after gifting her a vision, “I will give you understanding of all things at another time.”⁸¹ Marguerite d’Oingt, the writer of Beatrice’s vision, adds, “To our knowledge, she never wanted to reveal of this vision anything … but the fact that she could neither describe nor understand it.”⁸² While Hadewijch may often assert in her visions that she “saw and understood,” the precise content of this understanding remains elusive, conditional on her immersion in Minne and her soul’s understanding. It is almost intuitive even when put into writing, for it is God, not the mystic, who is the source of its content. In Vision 11, Hadewijch makes distinctions about inner and outer knowledge received in her vision. When seeing “an Infant being born in the souls who love in secret,” she “saw the forms [voermen] of many different souls, according to what each one’s life had been. … I received knowledge of the inside [van binnen] from some, and of the outer [van buten] from a great deal; and some became known from within [van binnen] of which I had known nothing of the outer [van buten]” (CW, 289).⁸³ She then justifies the ability to know something purely inwardly: “All that men see with the spirit [geeste] when engulfed in Minne is [fully] understood by men, is tasted by men, is seen by men, and heard by men” (CW, 289).⁸⁴

Whatever degree of understanding is permitted to the soul according to perfect measure with the divine is nevertheless delayed for the mystic in life; the event is only partially experienced and comprehended once put into language.⁸⁵ It is as though historical time had to catch up with the envelope of an atemporal experience, which is not delivered at the moment it occurs, but is postdated to the time it is hosted in language and then, later on, to the time of the affective register in the body. What is archived is thus a seed of a memory that waits to accrue meaning in time and eventually achieve legibility—both for the mystic and for her community. The ability to read the vision yet again becomes of central importance for the mystic and for those who read her.

This temporal syncopation of event, meaning, legibility, and time has a similar structure (although not identical in kind) to what Freud calls “belatedness,” and Laplanche calls “afterwardsness.” For Laplanche, as well as for Freud, belatedness (Nachträglichkeit) is an occurrence in which something is deposited in an individual (a message, a memory, an event) in a secondary form of consciousness that will be reactivated later on in primary consciousness and eventually be deciphered and transformed.86 Belatedness inverts temporal horizons, in that something of the past retroactively comes alive in the present; belatedness causes consciousness to go back into the trove of memory and decipher a message from a past that has a “future” inscribed within it. The message waits mutely—or is de-translated, as Laplanche calls it, since its meaning is rendered purely enigmatic, other, impenetrable—then is retranslated into the present, given the new ability to finally read and understand its message. The implanted past thus carries within it a futurity that can only be known and read retroactively. The latency of implantation, as Laplanche understands it, is similar to that of trauma, for the temporal lag is inherent to the event and not a perversion of it.⁸⁷ Unlike the decipherability of the traumatic event, however, the legibility of the vision nevertheless always carries within itself a limit, in that its message is only ever fully revealed in an even further time to come.

For the mystic, the incision of the eternal into the fabric of the everyday transpires as a disruptive occurrence that can only be absorbed and given a belated meaning that is experienced retroactively, as if for the first time. Traumatic in structure, the event cannot be fully experienced except through its becoming linguistic: that is, through its becoming readable, interpretable, and understood as a sign (even if the mystic or visionary is unable to fully grasp the sense, she must be able to read it and know that it harbors divine meaning). While first a hostage to spiritual messages, taken out of her outer person unexpectedly, the visionary is eventually able to render the message subject to herself, enough to allow her to host and deliver it as a text. What was once manifest as a temporal and spiritual event, or as an envisioned encounter with textuality, is transcribed or translated into a poetic interplay with textuality.

The temporal delay involved in the transmission of the vision into words involves the mystic’s wait for spiritual maturity, namely the ability to discern between love, reason, and will, and order them properly in relation to the spirit and body. In other words, in transmitting the vision to language, the mystic performs an ordering that the theologian describes. The mystic is able to organize the content of the vision as she orders her soul, allowing divinity to become the leading thread along which all aligns itself. The writing performs a sign of spiritual readiness to become the instrument through which divine work is performed.

The person writing—that is, the outer person associated with the time of the outer body—responds to and is responsible for bringing the inner body, the body represented (the inner body that experiences the mystical union) into the realm of language in the writing of the text. This does not mean that the inner person is “present” in the text in some magical way, but that the text represents it truthfully. The text represents a relation of the inner person to the outer according to its own linguistic (and temporalized) form. The reader may then use inner and outer senses to learn and align herself with what is represented in the text. The inner person guides the sense of the text, through the spiritual connection to God and the soul; the outer person provides an analogical means of understanding and furnishes visible and tangible signs of what works through it, hoping to become transformed by that work.

As a product that involves both persons, the visionary text is poised between inner and outer persons, inner and outer senses, providing an exemplary contact between the two according to a divine measure. It demonstrates the ideal senses of embodiment, those lived and those promised, in relation to the imago Dei. The visionary narrative pivots between the two persons and their embodiments, translating one into the language of the other, showing how the body should and often does conform to the soul, and how the soul (or inner person) is promised unity with the body.