Mediaeval Mystics

4 Mediaeval Mystics

We saw that women who didn’t fit the norm – transgressive women – were for a long time considered to be witches. If a witch supposedly dedicated herself to the devil then her opposite was a nun, who dedicated herself to God. But some senior nuns in the later middle ages wrote books – a transgressive act of itself for any woman at that time but even more so for one who had taken vows of obedience to a patriarchal religion. And worse, they often transgressed orthodox religious views. Literally cloistered in female communities and away from the control of men these religious women expressed deeply personal views in a way they would never have been allowed to do in the outside world. Of course any male priest, however junior, could give orders to any female nun, even an abbess, but in practice some convents were large and powerful; their abbesses were often highly literate and some communicated – discreetly – on equal terms with scholars around Europe in Latin even though the mere learning of Latin was transgressive for a woman.

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Some medieval abbesses wrote about secular matters and even composed fiction. The earliest of them was the canoness Hrotsvitha (or Hrotsvit, Roswitha) of Gandersheim in Saxony, born in the tenth century, who wrote plays in Latin – probably the first playwright of either gender since Roman times and the first female poet since Sappho. Like the later Christine of Pizan, Hrotsvitha said she was writing a virtuous response to sinful secular poetry, ‘my objective being to glorify, within the limits of my poor talent, the laudable chastity of Christian virgins in that same form of composition that has been used to describe the shameless acts of licentious women.’ This led her to ‘apply my mind and my pen to depicting the dreadful frenzy of those possessed by illicit love, and the insidious sweetness of their speech – things that should not even be named among us.’ Hrotsvitha wrote a note to her readers warning them that she would be trawling the depths of vice in order to illuminate virtue; like Christine of Pizan she borrowed secular forms to hold religious content.

In that same kind of composition in which the filthy pollutions of lewd women are recited, the praiseworthy chastity of holy virgins will be celebrated according to the ability of my little wit. This led me, not rarely, to be ashamed and to blush, that I had to think and write in this kind of composition about the hateful madness of illicit lovers and their evilly sweet talk, which are not permitted to reach our ears. But if I failed to do this because of my embarrassment, I could not carry out my purpose, nor expound fully the

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praise of innocents according to my powers, since the more the flatteries of the senseless lead to illicit things, the higher the glory of the heavenly helper and the more glorious the victory of the triumphant proves to be, especially when feminine fragility conquers and virile strength is confounded.

Like many female authors for the next thousand years, though for a different reason, Hrotsvitha wrote alone, literally in cloistered silence: as Virginia Woolf advocated, she had ‘a room of her own,’ in her case a cell in a convent where she kept her writing to herself; even in this tight

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community her fellow nuns didn’t know what she was up to. ‘Unknown to all around me, I have toiled in secret.’ Hrotsvitha attributes her inspiration, as did other religious female writers, solely to God. ‘Although prosody may seem a hard and difficult art for a woman to master, I, without any assistance but that given by the merciful grace of Heaven (in which I have trusted rather than in my own strength) have attempted in this book to sing in dactyls.’ Her plays were not translated into English until the 1500s, when at the time they were thought to have been written by the English St. Hilda of Northumbria, but they are all now in print.

Hrotsvitha’s works were written in three books: Liber Primus, The Book of Legends, lives of the saints written in verse; Liber Secundus, The Book of Drama, six plays emulating the Latin playwright Terence, trying to correct his misogyny: ‘Wherefore I, the strong voice of Gandersheim, have not hesitated to imitate a poet (Terence) whose works are so widely read, my object being to glorify, within the limits of my poor talent, the laudable chastity of Christian virgins in that self-same form of composition which has been used to describe the shameless acts of licentious women,’ and Liber Tertius, which contains histories in verse of the emperors Otto I and Otto II as well as a history of her own Gandersheim Abbey. The epistle of dedication at the beginning of her works to its male patrons strikes a balance between the expected humility of any religious writer, and the pride of her being a woman.

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That my natural gifts might not be made void by negligence I have been at pains, whenever I have been able to pick up some threads and scraps torn from the old mantle of philosophy, to weave them into the stuff of my own book, in the hope that my lowly ignorant effort may gain more acceptance through the introduction of something of a nobler strain, and that the Creator of genius may be the more honoured since it is generally believed that a woman’s intelligence is slower. Such has been my motive in writing, the sole reason for the sweat and fatigue which my labours have cost me. At least I do not pretend to have knowledge where I am ignorant. On the contrary, my best claim to indulgence is that I know how much I do not know.

The best known of these transgressive early abbesses today is the twelfth-century Hildegard of Bingen, the head of an abbey in the Rhineland, mainly because of the many beautiful songs and poems she wrote; her sung morality play Ordo Virtutum is arguably the first opera ever written. Hildegard was an extraordinary woman who corresponded as an equal with some of the great men of the twelfth century and wrote on botany and medicine as well theology, where her views were unorthodox and, in a male theologian might have brought trouble. Among

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other transgressive, pre-feminist ideas she wrote that the perfection of Mary counterbalanced the error of Eve, absolving women of responsibility for the evils of the world and raising them above men: after all a woman gave birth to God. ‘Because a woman brought death a bright Maiden overcame it, and so the highest blessing in all of creation lies in the form of a woman, since God has become man in a sweet and blessed Virgin.’ This is heresy, transgressing the doctrine of the Trinity but Hildegard got away with it – probably because the male Church elders wouldn’t trouble themselves to read the works of a woman.

Like other medieval mystics, Hildegard apologized that God should speak through a woman, but said that, regardless of gender, ‘every creature is a glittering, glistening mirror of Divinity.’ She also stressed the importance of the individual voice: ‘We cannot live in a world that is not our own, in a world that is interpreted for us by others. An interpreted world is not a home. Part of the terror is to take back our own listening, to use our own voice, to see our own light.’ Man or woman, everyone should find their voice, even if that might bring accusations of transgressiveness. ‘Dare to declare who you are. It is not far from the shores of silence to the boundaries of speech. The path is not long, but the way is deep. You must not only walk there, you must be prepared to leap.’ Although as a nun she might not be expected to have personal knowledge of

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the sexual act, Hildegard explicitly and highly transgressively describes how the woman has the power in sexual relationships and procreation.

When a woman is making love with a man, a sense of heat in her brain, which brings forth with it sensual delight, communicates the taste of that delight during the act and summons forth the emission of the man’s seed. And when the seed has fallen into its place, that vehement heat descending from her brain draws the seed to itself and holds it, and soon the woman’s sexual organs contract and all parts that are ready to open up during the time of menstruation now close, in the same way as a strong man can hold something enclosed in his fist.

Saint Teresa of Avila (1515 – 1582) transgressed the expectations of silence and obedience among nuns by writing to help her fellow nuns on the path of virtue; they needed it: Saint Bridget of Sweden (1303 – 1373) had earlier said that ‘there is so much abuse in the convents that their doors are kept open for clerics and laymen alike, whomever it pleases the sisters to let in, even at night. Accordingly, such places are more like brothels than holy cloisters.’ As has often been said, Teresa’s idea of religious ecstasy is very close to what many women would consider sexual ecstasy, but her aim was to induce purity in her sisters. Like many subsequent female writers, she explains that it needs a woman’s voice and

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a woman’s understanding to communicate ideas of virtue and chastity to other women.

I know that I am lacking neither in love nor in desire to do all I can to help the souls of my sisters to make great progress in the service of the Lord. It may be that this love, together with my years and the experience which I have of a number of convents, will make me more successful in writing about small matters than learned men can be. For these, being themselves strong and holding other and more important occupations, do not always pay such heed to things which in themselves seem of no importance but which may do great harm to persons as weak as we women are. For the snares laid by the devil for strictly cloistered nuns are numerous and he finds that he needs new weapons if he is to do them harm. I, being a wicked woman, have defended myself but ill, and so I should like my sisters to take warning by me.

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