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

In his work on the fourteenth-century anchoress Julian of Norwich, Denys Turner has pointed out that even though Julian’s works address issues familiar to the theologian, her way of developing these is unusual: “Unlike the typical monastic theologian, whose starting point and method of procedure are typically and explicitly scriptural, or the school theologian, who sets out theologically from a carefully formulated statement of a problem or quaestio, Julian’s theological reflections are elicited through a process of progressive intensification and complex elaboration of particular and personal experience.”² Julian transposes theological methodology into complex rhetorical and poetic reflections; whereas Turner says that these stem from “experience,” however, throughout this book I have attempted to add nuance to this notion by demonstrating that the mystic’s or visionary’s experience—as it is manifest to us—is already part and parcel of embodied textuality.³ Experience already enjoins the theological as a poetics and therefore is impossible to isolate without taking into account the ways in which such lived action is responding to and incorporating religious, cultural, and literary forms and practices.⁴ Mystics like Julian and Hadewijch call upon what I have liberally referred to as “the literary” or “the poetic” to represent the potential of how the theological (and, consequently, the philosophical) may be encountered in life, thus necessarily invoking or presupposing the embodied means of this encounter. Likewise, the visionary or mystical text grants the reader (or listener) “phenomenological access” to theological beliefs and scriptural truths in the experience of reading (or hearing)—through means that echo how those truths were made tangible to her. Because the mystic’s text reflects how experience and theology should be joined, it represents a “truer” experience of embodiment for the reader to experience and follow. Textuality orients a person’s access to scriptural truths through cognitive and corporeal means, thereby prompting the transformation of embodied experience as such from earthly to spiritual body, promising the unity of inner and outer persons.

In concluding, I will briefly sketch out how Hadewijch’s attention to the letter, textuality, reading, interpretation, the domains of inner and outer, and performing works might be further compared with other women’s mystical texts. While the articulation of these phenomena may differ for each mystic, the importance of joining the letter to inner and outer persons, reading to living, is pervasive in mystical texts in ways that help us better understand the invocation of embodiment and its ramifications in relation to the letter. Instead of searching for precise terminology amid the vocabulary of mystics, visionaries, theologians, and secular poetic traditions, if we look at how terms are employed and to what end, the inventiveness and continuity between literary and theological texts and devotional practices may fall into a clearer perspective, lessening the isolation of women’s textual practices.5 Reading across linguistic and historical horizons, I will show how, in a cursory fashion, this practice of the letter might be traced out in the works of both Julian of Norwich and the earlier male-authored Ancrene Wisse.

If we see women’s writing as performing theological meaning (in ways that differ rhetorically from the theologian’s), as Amy Appleford has emphasized in relation to Julian’s “deathbed” experience,⁶ for example, we should also attempt to understand how and why the performance of the theological is important beyond the manuscript page, and in ways that elucidate how body and text can and must be read together. If we conceptualize Julian’s hermeneutic and practice of composition according to a Trinitarian model—as Nicholas Watson and Denys Turner (among others) have demonstrated—we can see that this Trinitarian orientation also conceives of itself as a practice of living that teaches others how to fashion embodiment like Christ, as a word made flesh.⁷ The theological is invoked by means of a tangible medium, which by no means lessens the theological impulse; rather, it transforms phenomenality itself into what Derrida describes as a “force” or “potential,” a potential that orients how the theological must be felt and lived, even when—or especially when—the divine is experienced in negative terms as an absence, as is the case with Hadewijch’s Liederen.

I have read Hadewijch, by no means exhaustively, as a means of demonstrating that a constant attentiveness to the ubiquitous nature of scripture is called for from medieval and contemporary readers, as though Hadewijch—and, by extension, many a woman mystic—were a never-ending hermeneutic apparatus that turned other materialities, like that implicit in creaturely life, into occasions for reading. Life, affect, and vision present opportunities for reading and responding in ways that may be just as structurally complex as those presented by texts themselves. Given women’s prohibition from public preaching, the cultivation of women’s spirituality understandably required the strategic transposing and adapting of meaning elicited by the letter into other, nonhomiletic, exegetic means. Living the text thus becomes a mode of responsive exegesis, as the mystic or nun becomes an exemplum for others to follow and, at the same time, becomes adept at the transference and translation of one term into another, transposing concepts and terms into different registers (as in the registers of “inner” and “outer”), as one might transpose music from one key to another, allowing for the content to be adapted and adopted into its new medium.⁸ Even within Hadewijch’s work, the mystic or beguine’s relation to Minne, or Love, is transposed in different positions and perspectives based on experience and capacity, like those of the youth and the wise in her Liederen, as we saw in chapter 4.

The mirroring of “being” and “becoming” that operates in a Trinitarian fashion throughout Hadewijch’s work highlights a textuality already embedded in the speaker and her surrounding world. The teaching of textuality and embodiment as intrinsically related is one part of a pedagogic strategy for living according to scripture in order to fully understand and perfect a human being’s way of living in Christ. What I have emphasized is not a mere matching of one’s actions to the words of scripture; rather, meaning is simultaneously articulated via the letter and in bodily terms, allowing the incarnational aspect of meaning and its textual referent to work together in inextricable fashion. What we understand under the rubric of imitatio is not just an embodied practice in the conventional sense of the term—that is, a literalization or mimicry of Christ’s person—but is ideally a textual enactment, a poetics of embodiment. What may seem like a dualism of inner and outer aspects of a human being should be read as a dynamic interaction of inner and outer persons in their necessarily conflicted attempt to become like the Word.

Intentionally or not, this pedagogic strategy of becoming like the Word manifest in mystical texts also has the effect of showing how deeds and inner conduct enact a form of writing, regardless of the “unlettered” nature of the actor and regardless of whether the “life” becomes a written vita.9 Because the body is not conceived as one entity, but contingent on an amalgam of inner and outer persons (the inner being linked to the new perfected person), the text represents the union of inner and outer in Christic fashion rather than embodying it. It reflects and represents a union that only the human being, the host of the imago, can achieve in actuality postscriptum, becoming like the true Word for which the text speaks. Embodiment is thus necessary to fulfill the transformation promised by textuality if only to host the promise in yet another form. While the inner and outer persons and respective embodiments are conceived of in relation to an individual, the perfection of the inner represents fusion not only with Christ but with the larger communal body of the corpus mysticum and the community to which Hadewijch and others are bound. Even though visions single out individuals, as pedagogical instruments they are intended for greater communal purposes by means of which others may live according to “the way one reads,” to borrow from Bernard, that is, according to the way the mystic or visionary sees, reads, and interprets the workings of the divine.

Julian of Norwich’s long text, A Revelation of Love, ends with the promise of continuing the work of the divine that transpires in her revelation, explicitly signally the transition from text to embodiment I have just highlighted.10 In my short reflection on Julian, I would like to show how the Pauline and Augustinian anthropology, as it is manifest in her work, might allow us to understand this phrase in a way consonant with the temporal and material poetics I have underscored in my reading of Hadewijch. Although Julian’s use of Paul and Augustine substantially differs from Hadewijch’s in terms of intonation and underlying theological emphasis (among other things), my way of reading Hadewijch might help clarify what has been carefully described by Turner as “dualist” aspects of her theology and by Aers as its unintended Manichean extreme, permitting a fuller understanding of how the soul is embodied according to Julian.¹¹ By understanding Julian’s divisions of the human being into substance and sensualite in a Pauline fashion, and by showing how the registers of “inner” and “outer” are articulated in her works in both theological and thematic ways, I will briefly trace out my argument that doubleness need not be conceived of in oppositional terms, but rather as part of a performative tension that borrows from Pauline and Augustinian models for transformative ends and impacts the way we conceive of the mystic’s body.

Generally speaking, both Julian and Hadewijch are mystics “with no real precedent,” to quote Watson and Jacqueline Jenkins (referring to the former), in terms of their composing theologically and rhetorically sophisticated works in their respective vernaculars, although Julian (whose work is in Middle English) was born at least a century later, in 1343.¹² What is divided in Hadewijch’s work into different genres (each of which represents a different orientation of inner to outer, spiritual to earthly persons or senses) is, one could say, enjoined in Julian’s work as a whole.¹³ Julian fuses the pedagogical unfolding of spiritual truths (apparent in Hadewijch’s letters), visionary experience, and a performative lyricism (like that of Hadewijch’s songs) to elaborate the simultaneity of inner and outer registers in paradoxical ways, often through thematic and rhetorical tensions. Where Hadewijch’s works separate the atemporal visions from her temporally oriented letters and Liederen, Julian combines visionary activity with the didactic means to show how they reflect an understanding of creaturely life. Where the Liederen place an emphasis on absence and longing, illustrating the human experience of Minne from the perspective of the outer and its promise of becoming united with the divine, Julian will often, if not always, connect this absence with an illustration of how longing, pain, and suffering explicitly connect to Christ and the Trinity as a whole, despite a limited human perspective that cannot perceive this directly.

In other words, whereas Hadewijch will give a divine perspective of the doubled human being in her visions (explored in chapter 3), Julian will utilize this totalizing perspective throughout her works in figurative ways, allowing synecdochical figurations of the Trinity to fill in there where faith alone must operate. For example, as Philip Sheldrake and others have noted, in Julian’s Revelation, the parable of the Lord and Servant may be read as “an exposition of salvation history from God’s viewpoint,” while at the same time it presents the human means for understanding and becoming like the divine.¹⁴ Julian will often use the totalizing perspective of the divine (showing things “in his sight”) while contrasting it with what happens “as to my sight,” providing a unity of a limited human grasp along with the fuller perspective of the Creator. Julian’s figures and focal points identified for contemplation are, nevertheless, like Hadewijch’s personified figures in her songs, often transitory vehicles for a process of identification that does not intend to rest in any one particular model. Watson notes the following example: “The glorification of Mary in Chapter 25 [of her Revelation] now gives way to that of Jesus, as the contemplation of Mary is seen as no more than a stage on the way to the higher contemplation of God.”¹⁵ In addition, Julian’s writings emphasize the historical crucifixion and the suffering of Christ on the cross, even in descriptive detail, whereas Hadewijch stresses the intangible nature of Minne, placing far less emphasis (if any) on sin and transformative identification with the crucifixion. Each will emphasize, in different fashion, the “courtly” or “curtesy” in the relation of the divine toward human beings while drawing on bridal imagery of Song of Songs. Despite significant differences in their spirituality’s style of articulation and theological focal points, both place their ultimate emphasis on love and the lived promise of the Trinity in true Augustinian fashion. As Turner notes, this translates into an experience of suffering that is coterminous with a promise of redemption: “To live the Trinitarian life within history is to live by means of a mystery, it is to live the divine self-knowledge in the form of faith, and it is to live by means of the divine love in the form of vulnerability, suffering, and defeat.”¹⁶ Social and institutional differences are traceable in their respective works.

Hadewijch’s beguine spirituality, which finds meaning in and through an active participation in her surrounding community (both the community of her beguines and the larger social community), is manifest indirectly in the use of wide-ranging vernacular and religious materials to articulate spiritual concerns. Whereas the visions of Marguerite d’Oingt, discussed in chapter 2, reflect an emphasis on the book characteristic of Carthusian spirituality, Julian’s compositions echo the enclosure and liminality significant to life as an anchoress, as many scholars have demonstrated, not only in the geographic relation of the anchorhold to a church, but in her in-between status as a spiritual recluse and adviser to those who seek out advice from her outer window.¹⁷ As Turner observes that she is “neither religious, nor secular, neither clerical nor yet an ordinary laywoman, professed but not a nun; she is canonically marginal just as the physical positioning of her cell is attached to, but remains outside, the main body of her parish church.”¹⁸

These representations of the social and institutional aspects of their spirituality are, I emphasize, not only thematic, but part of a material poetics in which the outer person, as it inhabits its world, is transformed through conformity to the inner person into a spiritual body. The idiom of embodiment in each mystical text also reflects embodiment as it is theologically and culturally conceived. To this end, as Watson has urged, we need “a closer attention to the issues common to works thought of as mystical and works that are not” in order to show “the value of integrating mystics scholarship with the rest of literary history,” but also to demonstrate the intimate connection between embodiment and textuality.19

While separated by their respective idioms, Hadewijch’s and Julian’s spiritualities share an overt interest in how the inner serves as the truest orientation for the spiritual, instead of an outer rule providing this orientation. As an anchoress, Julian takes vows (of obedience, poverty, and stability of abode) in the presence of the local bishop, but her spirituality is not governed like nuns in a monastic setting, nor is it as open as that of beguines. Nevertheless, as for the beguines, the spirituality of the anchoress will manifest itself as an exercise that seeks to conjoin inner and outer persons, inner and outer senses, without completely devaluing the outer per se. As Bella Millett has noted, the earlier Ancrene Wisse—the male-authored guide for female solitaries, copied around 1224–1250 (contemporary with Hadewijch)—overtly emphasizes the priority of the inner in shaping the relation of the anchoress to her surroundings, using distinctions of the inner and outer senses in explicit fashion.²⁰ Citations from patristic and other sources saturate this work, performing the seamlessness between textuality and embodiment as it should be experienced.

The Ancrene Wisse explicitly maps out how inner and outer embodiments should relate to one another, in obsessive fashion, warning, for example: “The more the recluse stares outwards [ut-ward], the less light inwards [in-ward] she has from our Lord—and the same is true of the other senses. Qui exterior oculo negligenter utitur, iusto Dei iudicio interiori cecatur; see what Saint Gregory says: ‘Whoever guards her outward eye [utter ehnen] carelessly is blinded, through God’s just judgment, in her inner [inre]’—so that she may not see God with her spiritual sight [gastelich sihthe], nor through that sight know him, nor through that knowledge love him above everything.”²¹ Despite its structuring of the rule with minute attention to the outer senses, the Ancrene Wisse emphasizes the priority of the inner, noting how it trumps all, given that the inner law reflects the law of the divine, while the outer reflects the laws of human beings:

The Ancrene Wisse seeks to accommodate and transpose the relation of outer to inner in accordance with the anchoress’s capacity, similar to how Hadewijch advocates for different counsel and stages of Minne for those of varying levels of experience and capacity (yet with exponentially more scrutiny, given the differences of anchoritic life). As I noted in the introduction, Hadewijch’s disdain for an exterior rule stems from the perception that outer rules do not necessarily reflect the “inner beauty” that transpires in a spirit nurtured by goodwill: “With a rule of life, people encumber themselves with many things from which they could be free; and that causes reason to err. A spirit of goodwill assures greater interior beauty [in binnen scoendere] than any rule could devise” (CW, 54).22 While Hadewijch’s Liederen aim to teach, as I have argued, primarily from the outside–in through a lived temporality that aligns itself with suffering and absence, they nevertheless do so in relation to the capacities and promise of the inner conformity to Minne.

This emphasis on how the inner informs the outer is manifest in the social organization of beguine and anchoritic life: both evince unease with traditional monasticism and reflect an early thirteenth-century phenomenon in which many laywomen formed spiritual communities marginal to religious orders.23 As Millett notes, given the strong evidence of a Dominican origin of the Ancrene Wisse, “the Dominicans link with an existing tradition of extra-monastic reform may help to explain why the concept of the life of perfection in Ancrene Wisse is not wholly based on monastic models, and in some cases even seems to be defined in opposition to them.”²⁴ Affinities between anchoritic and beguine spirituality merit further study, especially given the relation of the Dominicans to early beguine spirituality and a history of contact between Norwich and the Low Countries.²⁵ Since this association would merit a book-length study in and of itself, I raise this point to show that the division of inner and outer persons as outlined in Hadewijch’s writings merits productive comparison with spiritual developments in England, especially for understanding how these divisions might complicate the notion of embodiment and community in later medieval English writings.²⁶

Whether or not anchoritic and beguine spirituality have concrete historical ties to one another, their shared emphasis on an Augustinian spirituality that recasts the outer person—thus embodiment itself—in relation to the inner person makes for a compound conception of the human being and its embodied nature. At the same time that the male-authored Ancrene Wisse sets up a tightly regulated economy related to embodiment, as Beckwith has demonstrated, its ultimate emphasis nevertheless rests on the divine inner law as reflected in each individual, thereby mediating how the outer has to be read and interpreted, even by the male confessor or meistre.²⁷ When one attempts to conceive of embodiment, even from the perspective of the masculine author, the exterior must be put in relation with the less visible inner referent associated with the inner person.

Julian emphasizes the personal nature of union with the divine, in a way that parallels Hadewijch’s insistence on the individual’s approach to Minne. Like Augustine’s De Trinitate, Julian finds the imago Dei within each individual, stressing the importance of inner discipline and the werkyng of grace and perfection in order for union with God to be known and performed. As Christopher Abbott notes, “God’s union through Christ with redeemed humanity is also—primarily—a personal union operating at the level of ‘man’s soule.’”²⁸ It is only in a turning inward, toward an understanding of how God dwells in her human nature that she may be closer to knowledge of this mutual indwelling. Julian follows the inward turn of Augustine’s imperative, “By knowledge of myself I shall get the knowledge of God,” and follows in the paths of Augustine’s mapping of the imago Dei in the soul (or mind as mens). When Julian writes that “oure soule, that is made, wonneth in God in substance—of which substance, by God, we be that we be,” in Julian’s Middle English, substance means “essential nature” or “real core” and follows Augustine’s reading of substance as essence.²⁹ What seems like a tautology in Julian will be a way of articulating the tension in humans of becoming what we already are. Julian will draw on the dynamic nature of Trinitarian mirroring I highlighted in chapter 1 (especially in her formulations of will and love) in her understanding of this “double making” of the human being.

As I noted earlier, one of the recent issues raised in Julian scholarship has focused on the substantive dualism in her understanding of the “doubly-made” human soul, that is, her claim that “we be doubel of Gods making: that is to sey, substantial and sensual.”30 With the risk of oversimplifying, I will present the general outlines of Julian’s formulation of doubleness in relation to the Augustinian and Pauline paradigms addressed throughout this book. Like Paul and Augustine, Julian will formulate her anthropology of the soul as twofold: what she terms the substance and the sensualite, which will also relate to what she calls ghostly and bodily ways of apprehending in her visions.³¹ Like Paul’s eso anthropos and Augustine’s inner person, Julian’s higher substantial part of the human being will be related to the eternal and incorruptible essence of the divine, and the lower sensualite (like the exo antropos, or outer person) to the way in which human beings dwell in time, and therefore to the perishable and changeable nature of a human being, the latter being implicated in sin.³² The sensualite will, as with Paul, be the site of redemption and restoration through temporal works, by means of which the whole person promises to be transformed.

For we be doubel of Gods making: that is to sey substantial and sensual. Oure substance is the hyer perty, whych we have in oure fader God almighty. And the seconde person of the trinite is oure moder in kind in oure substantial making, in whom we be grounded and roted, and he is oure moder of mercy in oure sensualite taking. And thus oure moder is to us diverse manner werking, in whom oure pertes be kepte undeperted. For in oure moder Crist we profit and encrese, and in mercy he reformeth us and restoreth, and by the vertu of his passion, his deth, and his uprising oneth us to our substance. Thus worketh oure moder in mercy to al his beloved children which be to him buxom and obedient.

(A REVELATION OF LOVE 58.32–41 [307–308])

As I demonstrated in my introduction, like Pauline texts (which Bernard McGinn has suggested are a primary scriptural source for Julian), the Revelation offers itself as a performative linguistic vehicle for understanding how this doubleness is yoked together.34 Denys Turner has also suggested that the discussions in the Revelation have “the character of ‘charisms’ in the Pauline sense of that word” in that “her reflections upon the revelations in the Long Text reveal that she sees them as teachings of an essentially prophetic charismatic character meant for the Church.”³⁵ Thus Julian’s style and objective (of building up the Church) suggest rhetorical and theological ties to Pauline patterning in ways that I can only gesture toward here.³⁶ Unlike either Paul or Augustine, however, Julian will invoke the figure of the maternal, speaking of the lower sensualite as that which takes part in our “moder Cryst” (making reference perhaps to what I outlined in chapter 1 as the theological idea of a “double birth,” the first corresponding to our image in God, and the other to our human temporal nature, which is associated with Christ’s second birth in time).³⁷ Julian underscores the Trinitarian underpinnings of this doubleness so that we may perceive how temporal and fallible human beings share in the promise of becoming what they already are, that is, the divine imago within.

Like Paul, Julian will focus on the generative nature of identification with Christ’s passion and resurrection, which will reform and restore the sensualite to its promised unity with divine substance. Christ becomes the model for the promise of perfection of the sensualite: “For oure substance is hole in ech person of the trinite, which is one God. And our sensualite is only in the seconde person, Crist Jhesu, in whom is the fader and the holy gost.”³⁸ Julian stresses the dynamic nature of unity, which is not that of material substances fusing together, but rather a process of identifications and orientations of higher and lower parts (modeled by Julian through her parable of the Lord and the Servant). As Watson and Jenkins observe, the Trinity itself is also articulated as a dynamic shifting process: “In A Revelation the Trinity is always process more than state, and all three persons turn out to be implicated in the soul’s ‘being,’ its ‘kinde’ or substance, with the Son taking a special role of his own.”³⁹ Again, like Augustine, Julian will use Christ as a focal point for demonstrating how human beings may understand and conform to the divine image, precisely because Christ offers an incarnational model that relates humanity to the Trinity. Yet Julian’s doubled humanity also reflects a Pauline understanding of sin as integral to the work of transformation and redemption of humanity through the figure of the crucifixion, for “dying by Crist, we be lastingly kept,” allowing for Christ to work “in us.”⁴⁰ Through the sensible God, humans may understand and become the promise of the divine in the sensualite. Unlike Hadewijch, Julian underscores the dying and crucified Christ, yet they both ultimately are interested in the resurrected and glorified body as it exemplifies the promise harbored in perfected humanity.

One of Julian’s greatest theological concerns in relation to this doubleness involves sin. In chapter 37 of her Revelation, Julian foreshadows how the substance and sensualite (given greater attention in chapters 45–53) relate to the will through an exposition on sin. While Julian explicitly states in chapter 27 that sin has no substance, she identifies wills that pertain to each part of the soul in a manner that has recently become a focal point for controversy:⁴¹

Watson and Jenkins gloss the first part of this: “just as there is a bestial will in the lower part of the soul that can will nothing good, even so there is a godly will in the higher part, a will so good that it can never will evil but always good.”42 It is at this point that Aers will take issue with Julian’s formulation of the will, claiming that “whatever Julian’s intentions may have been, her teaching about a will that is untouched by the sin performed by the sinner takes her toward the position Augustine held as a Manichee.”⁴³ In this light, if this were the case one could read Julian’s illustration of two battling wills, as Turner characterizes it, as if “the two forms of inclination within different parts of human nature (one fallen, the other not) are actually distinct powers of the soul, battling one another as do uncorrupted good and corrupted evil. Such a reading of her teaching would, were it in fact true to Julian’s thought, reduce her theological anthropology to a form of interiorized Manichean dualism.”⁴⁴ Turner clearly disagrees with this characterization, arguing that we do not have to “think of moral conflict as necessarily occurring between two distinct desires or forms of desire, but as ambiguity within one and the same structure of desire,” making all experience of desire self-conflicted given the incommensurability of a human orientation towards the divine.⁴⁵ Yet this passage also permits another reading, one that would align itself with the Pauline and Augustinian paradigms I have highlighted throughout this book. If we note the difference in grammatical construction (“may will no good” paralleling “which wille is so good”), we may hear this construction in the following way: just as there is a bestial will (or desire) in the lower part of the soul (the sensualite), a will which may, if it chooses, distance itself from the good—(not necessarily willing “something” evil)—even to the extent that there is nothing good in what it wills, so too there is a godly (or goodly) will (or desire) in the higher part of human beings (in the substance) that, because of its inherent goodness in what it is, can only will good and never evil. As Anna Kelner has noted, the beastly will’s desiring “no good” is not to be conflated with an evil content; rather, this will “maintains the memory and meaning of the good even in its absence.”⁴⁶ Julian’s formulation plays with parallel constructions and negation that perform, on a linguistic level, how doubleness is enacted in life. Even though substance and sensualite are parallel constructs—one reflecting the image of God, the other reflecting the promise of the divine in a temporal medium—the lower will may misalign itself in relation to the higher potential of the divine will, through which all human beings are promised salvation. Julian’s remedy for humanity shows that because “we be that he loveth,” in the higher part of the soul, harboring the potential for perfection from the perspective of the divine, we may “endlessly … do that he liketh” and conform human will to divine will prefigured within through doing. Being and doing are part of a two-fold process to become what you are “now,” as Julian says, that is, in the time of humanity, “as welle while that when we be there before his blessed face,” in the future promised face-to-face moment. Julian’s understanding of human and divine parts within each human being may be read in light of these temporal tensions, in which the promise of the substance can be grasped in and through the sensualite.⁴⁷

According to Julian’s underlying logic of the “necessity of sin,” both the higher and the lower parts function together in promising unity and salvation (in the oneness of love), and work according to a Christic model of suffering and redemption.⁴⁸ Julian seeks to close up and heal an open and potentially divided person through the theological work of her text and, even more significantly, in the performance and work of the passio, as it inclines itself toward divine grace. “Not yet performed,” the book pleads for a continuation of its work—but it asks for a continuation according to what has already begun in the book itself, by God’s gift and grace, that is, to what already performs in the work of the book, not as Julian’s work, but as God’s. Hence the book’s work must be continued, according to Julian (as to her syght), in her actions and in her performance postscriptum.

Soul, language, vision, and embodied passio are all knit together, according to the Trinitarian promise of unity. Once again, embodiment and language are yoked together as means of understanding just how human beings may become like the Word-made-flesh. When Turner notes that “contemplatives like Julian saw themselves as poised on an eschatological cusp formed by the convergence of the ‘now’ of time and the ‘not yet’ of eternity,” we can apply this temporal tension to both the materiality of embodiment and the stylistic way of echoing the promise of the whole within the part.49 Only then can we see how embodiment itself is caught in these temporal and material tensions dramatized by the text. The text mediates a relay between the sculpting and scripting of the letter and the sense of the substance and sensualite, between inner and outer persons, between deeds and their formative effect on the soul (and vice versa). The reading of the text thus produces a writing, that is, the text informs embodiment so as to engender another visible and legible figure.

Both Hadewijch’s and Julian’s writings aim to initiate, pedagogically, the assumption of a new and truer persona, and, as I have demonstrated, this adoptive process does not end with the text, nor should it ever end. The mystery of the promised face-to-face encounter with the imago is appealed to in an implicit or explicit future tense—and not only for theological reasons (in terms of the eternal promised futurity of the Pauline face-to-face mirroring). This implied futurity also alludes to the temporal and embodied space of what happens post-text and to an incorporation of the text’s prescriptive in terms of the reader’s “new” persona, reborn in the Pauline sense, living the inner as the promised new perfected person incarnate. Like the postscriptum of Julian’s “not yet performed,” the text anticipates (and hopes to predict) its earthly afterlife in the addressee’s promised body.

As we have seen throughout this book, the imitatio imagined by Hadewijch, Marguerite, and Julian involves more than copying: mirroring entails a reflection on what one already is in one’s inner person and a becoming the promise of this figure in life. This transforms the very nature of a temporally bound being in that it must always be put in relation to the promise in becoming. This reflection of promise in the temporal body recasts the body in the frameworks of scripture, liturgy, and other written and performed works, individual as well as collective. Because reading and contemplating texts—like the 150 Psalms or the Song of Songs—structure experience and interaction with other people and texts, the interpretive process becomes a template for understanding how works reflect the divine and how one should read, understand, and feel works from the inside out, as individuals and as communal beings. Interpretation is therefore deeply connected to “feeling”; an affective response is a sign of the interiorized Logos and its proper comprehension. Rote actions or deeds, however good they may seem, might reflect a hollow shell with no substance; interpretation thus becomes a means to inform, reform, or even constitute this less accessible core. Experience of the world is structured as one experiences a text, hence interpretation—reading the outer according to an inner invisible meaning—becomes a means for the experience of inner and outer to come together in thought, affect, and practice. While Hadewijch does not intend the speakers of her Liederen to fuse with her text to the point of indistinction, but intends that the speakers fuse, like her text (as its postscriptum), with the represented object of desire, the text does mediate, appeal to, and reflect a desired fusion of inner and outer bodies as the speaker is increasingly able to understand and embody the figure to which she aspires.

The imbrication in women’s mysticism, of the sensory with gloss and scripture, is therefore not so much a marker of women’s self-determined, independent, and “fleshy” form of devotion as it is a sign, generally speaking, of a technology of reading and interpretation. It is a symbol of what is implicit and operative in lectio divina that extends beyond the book.50 The fusion of gloss with the letter of scripture appeals to this mode of applied reading, demonstrating its translatability and interpretation into various forms and its ability to be embedded and read in more than just the materiality of the scroll or manuscript page. As scholars, when our categories for classification of medieval writings extend beyond the demarcation of gender, period, or genre and invite other ways of thinking through how reading and textuality are operative (in spiritual, moral, or social formation), we have in our hands the ability to further identify connections between texts and traditions that are just as historically specific and permit a better assessment of the literary qualities in women’s spirituality.