Philosophy

Medieval women's mysticism

The flowering of visionary and contemplative writing by women in the Latin West, roughly the twelfth through fifteenth centuries — much of it claiming direct, unmediated experience of God.

Medieval women’s mysticism is the body of visionary and contemplative writing produced by women in the Latin West between roughly the twelfth and fifteenth centuries — a literature in which the authority claimed is not office or learning but direct experience of God. Women were barred from the priesthood, from the universities, and from public teaching; what many of them claimed instead was that God had shown them something firsthand, and that the showing licensed the speech that followed.

The structural fact comes first because everything else turns on it. By the high Middle Ages the channels of religious authority were sealed against women on every side. Ordination, and with it the power to consecrate and to absolve, was closed. The cathedral schools that hardened into the universities of Paris, Bologna, and Oxford — where theology was becoming a technical Latin science of disputation and the gloss — admitted no women. The Pauline injunction that a woman keep silence in the assembly was read as a standing prohibition on public teaching and preaching. A woman who wished to say something about God had, in principle, no licensed place from which to say it. The mystical claim met that wall directly. If God had spoken to a soul, or shown it a thing, or drawn it into union, then the soul possessed a knowledge that came neither from ordination nor from the schools, and against which the usual disqualifications had no purchase. The vision was a credential the institution had not issued and could not easily revoke. This is the wager that runs under the whole literature: that an unmediated showing is its own warrant, prior to office and prior to learning, and that the one who receives it is therefore permitted — even obliged — to speak.

The twelfth century: Hildegard and the prophetic license

The figures are diverse and largely do not form a school; they are better read as a recurring solution to a single problem, arrived at independently across three centuries and several languages. The earliest of the great instances is Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179), a Rhineland Benedictine magistra and abbess who, beginning around 1141, set down an enormous corpus of visionary theology: the trilogy of Scivias (“Know the Ways”), the Liber Vitae Meritorum, and the Liber Divinorum Operum, along with letters, liturgical song, a morality play, and works of natural science and medicine. Hildegard did not claim union so much as commission. She wrote as a prophet in the Old Testament mold — the paupercula feminea forma, the poor little figure of a woman, through whom a Living Light spoke precisely because she was unlearned and weak, so that the words could not be mistaken for her own. This self-presentation, at once self-deprecating and absolute, secured her an authority no other woman of the century approached: she corresponded with popes, emperors, and abbots, preached on tour in the Rhineland, and obtained, through Bernard of Clairvaux and Pope Eugenius III at the Synod of Trier (1147–48), a papal endorsement of her visions. Hildegard establishes the template at its most defensible. The license is prophetic rather than mystical in the strict sense; the divine showing authorizes the speech, and the speaker’s very disqualification becomes the proof that the source is not herself. Benedict XVI named her a Doctor of the Church in 2012, one of only four women so titled.

The thirteenth century: the beguines and the courtly soul

In the thirteenth century the center of gravity shifts from the cloister to the city, and from the prophetic mode to the language of love. The beguines — laywomen of the Low Countries, northern France, and the Rhineland who, from the late twelfth century, lived in chastity, manual work, and prayer without taking permanent vows or adopting an approved rule — produced some of the boldest religious writing of the age. Their movement was socially anomalous, neither fully lay nor fully religious, and theologically generative: it gave Europe some of its first sustained theological writing in the vernacular languages, a literature Beguine mysticism carries as its core. Two figures stand at its head. Hadewijch, writing in Middle Dutch in mid-thirteenth-century Brabant, is the supreme literary voice of the strand now called minne-mysticism. Her central category is minne — Love, a feminine-gendered noun she lifts straight from the courtly lyric of the troubadours and refigures so that it names at once God, Christ, divine love, and the soul’s furious pursuit of it. Allied to it is orewoet, the storm or madness of love: the near-bodily surge of longing in which the soul both rages toward union and recoils from it. Her oeuvre — visions, strophic songs set to existing melodies, letters, and poems — survives only in late manuscripts copied a century after she wrote; the original is lost, and almost nothing of her life is recoverable beyond what the texts imply, including opposition that drove her into a wandering condition.

Mechthild of Magdeburg (c. 1207–c. 1282), writing in Middle Low German, casts the same soul–God bond in the heated vocabulary of courtly love: her Das fliessende Licht der Gottheit (The Flowing Light of the Godhead) stages dialogues between the soul and God as bride and bridegroom, lover and beloved, in a register of desire, complaint, and reciprocity that has no precedent in Latin devotion of the same daring. A former beguine, she entered the Saxon convent of Helfta only late in life, and the convent gives the period its other register entirely. Where Hadewijch and the beguines are courtly and exposed, the women of Helfta — Mechthild of Magdeburg in old age, the choirmistress Mechthild of Hackeborn (c. 1240–1298), and Gertrude the Great (1256–c. 1302) — were enclosed, Latinate, and saturated in the liturgy, their visions arriving inside the chanted Mass and Office and structured by the church year. Helfta’s hallmark is the devotion that grew from Gertrude’s vision of resting against the wound in Christ’s side and hearing his heartbeat: a current the Catholic tradition reckons among the medieval roots of the cult of the Sacred Heart.

Marguerite Porete and the limit of the license

The wager that the showing licenses the speech had a limit, and Marguerite Porete is where the institution drew it. A beguine from the County of Hainaut, writing in Old French around the 1290s, Porete composed the Mirror of Simple Souls — not a record of visions but a sustained allegorical dialogue in which the personified figures of Love, Reason, and the Soul debate the soul’s ascent through seven states to a condition Porete calls adnientement, annihilation. The annihilated soul, having returned to the being it has in God before it has being in itself, becomes Love, and so passes beyond the virtues — not by despising them but because it has become what they were trying to produce, and no longer needs to be commanded to its own works. Porete distinguished a Holy Church the Little, governed by Reason and the clergy, from a Holy Church the Great, governed by Divine Love, of which the visible Church is the partial expression — a claim that placed the perfected soul beyond ecclesial mediation without denying the institution’s reality. To her judges this was the most dangerous sentence in the book. The bishop of Cambrai had already burned the Mirror publicly in her presence; she continued to circulate it. Arrested and delivered to the inquisitor William Humbert — Philip the Fair’s confessor, then simultaneously prosecuting the Templars — she refused to swear the inquisitorial oath and spent some eighteen months in custody in silence. On the testimony of twenty-one regent masters of theology at Paris, who pronounced the book heretical without examining her, she was declared a relapsed heretic and burned in the Place de Grève on 1 June 1310. The case sits exactly on the line. Sixteen months later the Council of Vienne issued the decree Ad nostrum, whose condemned articles of the heresy of the Free Spirit draw their phrasing from the Mirror — including the proposition that the perfected soul dismisses the virtues — and Cum de quibusdam mulieribus, which abolished the beguine status itself. The Mirror, however, did not die with its author. It passed for six centuries through Latin, Middle English, and Italian translations as an anonymous spiritual classic, attributed to no one or to others, until the historian Romana Guarnieri identified Porete as its author in 1946. What the trial demonstrates is the wager’s edge: where the unmediated showing was read as consistent with the Church’s order, it was a credential; where it was read as superseding the Church’s order, it was a capital charge — and the line between the two could turn on who held the book and how they chose to read it.

The fourteenth century: the showings and the public mystic

The English tradition produced the period’s most luminous instance of the private showing. Julian of Norwich, an anchoress enclosed beside the church of St Julian at Conisford in Norwich, received sixteen visions during a near-fatal illness on or about 13 May 1373, and spent the rest of her life interpreting them. She is the earliest woman known to have written a book in English. Her Revelations of Divine Love survives in a short text, set down soon after the visions, and a long text expanded over some two decades of contemplation, in which the showings become the matter of a theology of divine love so far-reaching that it presses against the edges of received doctrine — God as mother as well as father, the famous assurance that “all shall be well,” a near-universalist hope held in tension with the Church’s teaching on sin and judgment. Julian is the type of the sanctioned visionary: enclosed, obedient, careful, working out the meaning of what she had seen with a patience that the institution could read as orthodox. At the other pole stands Catherine of Siena (1347–1380), a Dominican mantellata — a lay penitent of the Order of Penance of St Dominic — who turned the authority of her interior life outward into the public arena. From a circumscribed lay vocation she rose to a position of extraordinary influence, dictating some 380 letters and the Dialogue of divine providence, ministering to the plague-stricken and the condemned, and intervening directly in the politics of the papacy: she urged Gregory XI to return the Curia from Avignon to Rome and labored to heal the schism that followed. Catherine demonstrates the mystical credential at its most public and most accepted — a woman without office or Latin learning addressing popes in the voice of one whose authority came from God — and she was canonized in 1461 and named a Doctor of the Church in 1970.

The recurring features

Several features recur across these texts, and they are best read together as the grammar of the form. Much of it is affective — the goal is union felt in love rather than grasped in argument, frequently rendered through images of bridal embrace, hunger, and the wounded body. The bridal language is not incidental: it descends from the monastic reading of the Song of Songs perfected by Bernard of Clairvaux, whose eighty-six Sermons on the Song of Songs made the Bride-soul and the Bridegroom-Word the governing image of Western affective mysticism, and whose insistence that the meaning of the Song is opened by experientia, experience, rather than by argument supplied these women with a theological warrant ready to hand. A good deal of the writing is in the vernacular rather than Latin, which made it readable by people outside the clergy and also more exposed to suspicion — and which made its authors, in the phrase the scholarship would later adopt, the first vernacular theologians of the Latin West. Nearly all of it negotiates the hard problem the structural exclusion created: a woman writing of God on her own authority risked the charge of heresy, and the line between sanctioned visionary and condemned heretic could turn on who was reading. The same speculative audacity that drew popes to Hildegard sent Porete to the stake. The decisive variable was rarely the doctrine in isolation; it was the doctrine read against the institution — whether the showing was taken to complete the Church’s authority or to overleap it.

The relation to the wider currents of medieval contemplation is intimate and two-directional. The German Rhineland mysticism of Meister Eckhart, Tauler, and Suso shares a vocabulary of detachment, the uncreated ground of the soul, and union beyond images that runs strikingly close to Porete’s adnientement: Eckhart held his second Paris regency beginning eleven months after Porete’s execution, in the same Dominican house from which her prosecution had been directed, and the structural identity between his gelâzenheit and her nient vouloir has persuaded many scholars that the speculative tradition flowed across the clerical–lay and Latin–vernacular divides in both directions. Both Porete’s Ad nostrum and Eckhart’s condemnation in the 1329 bull In agro dominico can be read as a single ecclesial response to one doctrine of the soul’s uncreated being in God, spoken once in a beguine’s French and once in a Dominican master’s German. The whole literature belongs within Christian mysticism and the long arc of mysticism as such, drawing on the Neoplatonic inheritance — the Neoplatonism mediated through Augustine, Pseudo-Dionysius, and the Victorines — that gave the West its grammar of ascent, return, and the soul’s deiform ground. The Franciscan Bonaventure, whose Itinerarium Mentis in Deum charts the mind’s journey into God by way of love rather than discursive reason, gives the same affective Neoplatonism its most ordered Latin form in the very generation of the early beguines, and the women’s writing remains a central case for any comparative mysticism that asks whether union-language across traditions names one experience or many. The Eucharistic dimension is its own thread: the visions cluster around the communion host, the Mass is the setting in which many of the showings arrive, and the body of Christ received in the sacrament is the body the women’s imagery dwells on with such intensity.

Scholarship and the recovered texts

The modern picture of this literature was substantially remade in the last quarter of the twentieth century, and the remaking turned on refusing to read these women as pathology. Caroline Walker Bynum’s Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (University of California Press, 1987) argued that the fasting, the eucharistic hunger, and the bodily and food imagery so pervasive in these texts were not symptoms of disordered appetite but a deliberate and sophisticated theology, centered on Christ’s suffering flesh and on the communion host — a theology that made the female body, with its capacity to feed and to suffer, an instrument of union rather than an obstacle to it. Her earlier Jesus as Mother (1982) had already located the women within a high-medieval affective and bodily piety shared by men and women alike. Bernard McGinn’s The Flowering of Mysticism: Men and Women in the New Mysticism, 1200–1350 (Crossroad, 1998), the third volume of his multi-volume The Presence of God, gave the period its standard synthetic account and treated the beguines as serious speculative theologians rather than emotional outliers, advancing the category of vernacular theology for what they were doing: theology of full ambition conducted outside Latin, outside the schools, and largely by people the schools excluded. Barbara Newman’s From Virile Woman to WomanChrist (1995) reframed the gendered logic of medieval women’s theology, and Amy Hollywood’s The Soul as Virgin Wife (1995) read Mechthild of Magdeburg, Marguerite Porete, and Eckhart together as a single apophatic conversation across the gender line. Sean Field’s The Beguine, the Angel, and the Inquisitor (2012) is the definitive reconstruction of the Porete trial.

The primary texts themselves are increasingly accessible. The most fully attested in the public domain is Julian: Grace Warrack’s 1901 edition of the Revelations of Divine Love, drawn from the British Library Sloane manuscript of the long text, is hosted in full at the Christian Classics Ethereal Library. Hadewijch’s Middle Dutch works survive in Jozef van Mierlo’s critical editions, with the diplomatic text of the Visioenen freely available through the Digital Library for Dutch Literature. Catherine of Siena’s afterlife in English begins with Edmund Gardner’s 1907 study, which prints translated letters in its appendices and remains a standard public-domain point of entry. Porete’s Mirror is the hard case: no critical edition of the Old French is yet in the public domain, and its surviving English-language presence before 1930 runs through Evelyn Underhill’s 1911 essay and Clare Kirchberger’s 1927 edition of the anonymous Middle English “M.N.” translation — the same translation preserved in the British Library codex that also carries the short text of Julian, so that the condemned book and the sanctioned anchoress survive, by an accident of binding, between the same covers.

What the label gathers, then, is less a single doctrine than a recurring situation and a single audacious move within it: people shut out of the official channels of religious authority who located, in the claim of direct experience, a source of speech the official channels had not issued and could not fully police. The move is the same in Hildegard’s prophetic commission and in Catherine’s letters to popes, in Julian’s enclosed showings and in the minne of the beguines, and in Porete’s annihilated soul that takes leave of the very virtues. It does not depend on canonization to be valid, and condemnation does not refute it; it stands or falls on the bare claim that God shows himself to a soul without first consulting the soul’s office or its Latin. Hildegard was made a Doctor of the Church and Catherine canonized; Porete was burned and her book made anonymous. The difference lay not in whether the experience was real to the one who had it — each staked everything on that — but in whether a Church reading over her shoulder could accommodate the conclusion she drew from it. The claim itself was indifferent to the verdict. A woman who held that God had spoken to her directly had, by that holding, already stepped past the wall; what remained was only the question of what the wall would do about it.

→ In the library: Adjacent context — The Cloud of Unknowing (Underhill, 1912), the anonymous English contemplative tradition · Adjacent context — The Cell of Self-Knowledge (Gardner, 1910), early English treatises, including Catherine of Siena material

Sources

McGinn 1998
Bynum 1987
Bynum 1982
Newman 1995
Field 2012
Guarnieri 1965
Hollywood 1995