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 what defines ‘Mysticism’, and how what we call medieval Christian mysticism has its roots in ancient and early Christian ascetism. Practices of seclusion and bodily discipline reach back even to Stoicism. The focus as we traverse this history will be on women’s changing participation and role in this kind of lifestyle, which we’ll learn about by reading from the fascinating, sometimes troubling, Life of Mary of Egypt, a fifth-century hermit that captured the medieval imagination and shaped expectations of female religious life for centuries to come. We end with the changing spiritual landscape of the twelfth century: between 1130 and 1165, at least 85 new religious communities for women were founded in Europe. This class then provides the historical grounding – social, literary, theological – for venturing into the mystical figures and readings of the next four sessions. 
    
2. Love and Friendship: Goscelin’s Liber confortatorius, Aelred of Rievaulx's De Institutione Inclusarum, and the Ancrene Wisse 
   Reflecting the explosion of numbers of nunneries, the end of the eleventh to start of the thirteenth century sees the emergence of works prescribing the proper spiritual practices and daily routines of enclosed women. They were all by men, sometimes in the form of love letters – as in the case of Goscelin’s Book of Comfort for the English recluse Eva. In this class we’ll read extracts from three fascinating works which first of all give insight into the daily routines and practices of enclosed women, and which also introduce the centrality of male-female love in the history of mysticism. Do these texts imply platonic or romantic love between recluses? How to make sense of the erotic imagery sometimes found in these great works of self denial? We’ll try reading between the lines of guides for women, probing at the potential gaps between ideals and realities, and debate whether we’re looking at stories of female choice, or male coercion – or a mixture of the two.
    
3. Visionaries in their own words: Hildegard of Bingen and Christina 
   of Markyate
   The twelfth century gives us the first texts written from the perspectives of female visionaries. Today we read from the very different works, of Hildegard of Bingen and Christina of Markyate. The 12th-century work The Life of Christina of Markyate tells the life of 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. Written by a close and devoted member of her community, the Life is scattered with intimate, conversational visions of Christ and the holy family. These make for fascinating comparison and contrast with the complex, diagrammatic, sometimes frightening visionary experiences recorded and illustrated, almost contemporaneously, by Hildegard of Bingen in Germany, who entered the Benedictine monastery at Disibodenberg at the age of eight and went on to become its abbess in 1136. We’ll try deciphering her famous images from the Scivias; and maybe even draw our own interpretations as a way of more closely engaging with this extraordinary imagination.
    
4. Mother, Businesswoman, Mystic: the uncategorisable Margery Kempe
   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, Theologian 
   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.