The Medieval mystics

Aims

This course aims to:

• guide you through parts of the major works (or biographies/visions) of the great female medieval mystics
• give you a basic understanding of the development of medieval spirituality and religion in Europe, roughly 1100-1500
• build your confidence approaching, analysing, and comparing medieval religious texts and images

Course content

This course will immerse you in the world of medieval women’s devotion. We’ll focus on the twelfth to fourteenth centuries and most of our key texts will be from the British Isles, specifically East Anglia. However, to make sense of these works we’ll have to look back in time, to the foundations of monasticism in the 5th century, and the earliest nunneries such as the Anglo-Saxon nunnery at Whitby; and we’ll also cast an eye across major European centres, and patterns of female religious life being set on the continent, and in Scandinavia, that shaped developments in medieval England. Our key figures (and texts) will be Christina of Markyate, Hildegard of Bingen, the Ancrene Wisse (a Middle English guide to living as an ‘anchoress’, or recluse), Margery Kempe, and Julian of Norwich. On the one hand we’ll be reading these for their ‘mystical’ content, comparing and contrasting how these authors present their encounters with God or Christ, or other divine ‘shewings’. What is so enticing about these texts, however, is how the extraordinary sits next to the ordinary - even takes the form of the ordinary. The divine and the domestic or mundane are not at odds but intertwined: Margery Kempe’s first visions come to her after a physically brutal childbirth, while Julian uses the imagery of roof tiles to evoke Christ’s drops of blood, and a hazelnut to evoke creation. So as well as learning about medieval theology through these works, we get fascinating insight into the practical minutiae of medieval women’s lives, from their levels of literacy, to their marital relations, to the logistics of pilgrimage. The lives and beliefs of medieval recluses seem anathema to how we live and think today – their practices and visions both entice and disturb us. On this course, we’ll go beyond surface appearances and try to see these women in three dimensions. Listening closely to their voices, and the voices of people who knew them, we might even discover some common ground in the cell of the medieval anchoress. 

What to expect on this course

This course will be taught through a combination of lecture-style teaching, open seminar discussion and individual and group activities. A class might begin with twenty minutes of lecturing, followed by a whole-group effort to read and analyse a primary source, followed by work in partners answering a set of questions on individual passages and a coming together to share our thoughts and reflections. There may be opportunity for short presentations. We’ll be working together to unpick a rich history. The emphasis will be on discovery, discussion, making connections, and hopefully debate!

Course sessions

1. Women and Medieval Asceticism

   We’ll explore the position and roles of women in medieval Christianity from around 500 AD, up to the explosion of new forms of religious life available to women in 12th-century Europe: between 1130 and 1165, at least 85 new religious communities for women were founded in Europe. And writings about individual women’s lives and spiritual experiences begin to emerge. What gave rise to these changes? How did such texts come into being? What did they say? We’ll ponder these questions through close reading of extracts from two texts: Bede’s record of the life and deeds of the 7th-century abbess of Whitby, Saint Hild, and the lively, troubling, illuminating East Anglian 12th-century work The Life of Christina of Markyate, about a girl (1096/8-1155) from Huntington who escaped sexual violence and lived in disguise for a time on her journey to becoming a recluse.

2. Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179)

   Hildegard of Bingen entered the Benedictine monastery at Disibodenberg in Germany at the age of eight and went on to become its abbess in 1136, as well as a renowned visionary, musical composer, theologian, medical writer and practitioner, and poet – perhaps the greatest polymath of her age. We’ll read directly from her Scivias (‘Know the Ways’), a verbal and visual record of 26 visions she experienced; and from her biography by Theodoric of Echternach. Through immersion in her music, words, and images we’ll try to square her achievements with her statements about being of the ‘weaker sex’, incapable of theology; as well as her reception in modern times – from historians’ diagnoses of her visions as the result of migraines, to the idea she was the past life of a famed (of course, male) Russian philosopher.

3. The Ancrene Wisse, Aelred of Rievaulx's De Institutione Inclusarum, and Goscelin’s Liber confortatorius

   Between the end of the eleventh to start of the 13th century, several works were produced to prescribe the proper spiritual practices and daily routines of enclosed women. They were all by men. In this class we’ll read extracts from these fascinating works which give us insight into the motivations, theology, and practical minutiae of this lifestyle of seclusion and self-denial, and into gender relations between men and women in the period. Did women truly choose to live in this way? Why? How reliable about their practices are the texts which survive? Do they suggest a relationship of coercion between women and their male guides, or something else? 

4. Margery Kempe (1373–1438)

   Margery was the daughter of a merchant from King’s (then Bishop’s) Lynn who married, had fourteen children, worked as a brewer and miller – and was also a visionary, famous pilgrim (travelling in the same era as Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales), and is often considered the first female autobiographer (she wrote her Life by dictation). We’ll explore the meeting of the ordinary and extraordinary in this remarkable woman. Her Life is rife with anecdotes which make for amusing as well as disturbing reading. Through analysis of key parts of the text, we’ll discover how she went from Norfolk businesswoman to renowned visionary and traveller, how she was revered but also penalised by people at the time, and – as with Hildegard – the varied ways historians have attempted to explain Margery as a medieval phenomenon.

5. Julian of Norwich (1343–1416)

   We end with one of the most revered Christian visionaries and theologians not just of the Middle Ages but of the past two millennia: Julian of Norwich, who Margery herself visited for counsel in 1413 (and whose conversation has recently been reimagined in a novel we’ll look at by Victoria Mackenzie). Despite similarities (both Margery and Julian describe ill health giving rise to their visions) the two women lived very different lives. Margery travelled; Julian was enclosed in the same cell for decades. Unlike Margery, she also seems to have been able to read theological works and even write herself – like European counterparts Bridget of Sweden and Catherine of Siena. We’ll have a go at interpreting the moving, difficult, often intensely physical imagery of her Revelations of Divine Love and how her example cemented the importance of a specifically feminine language of divine encounter in Christian theology for future centuries. 

Learning outcomes

As a result of the course, you will gain a greater understanding of the subject and you should be able to:

• give an account of some of the key developments in medieval European female spirituality – societal and theological
• describe some critical approaches to the medieval female mystics, be able to weigh the pros and cons of various historical approaches, and identify prevailing trends in scholarship on these women
• approach and analyse original medieval texts (in translation) with greater confidence

Required reading

Furlong, Monica (editor), Visions and Longings: Medieval Women Mystics (Boston: Shambhala, 1996) - contains extracts from some of our key texts.

Gillespie, Vincent, ‘Preface’, and Watson, Nicholas, ‘Introduction’, in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Mysticism, Fanous, Samuel and Gillespie, Vincent (editors.) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pages ix–xiv, and 1–29.