By: Siena Di Sera
“‘Christ as Mother.’” St. Chisostom’s Church News and Views, 15 Mar. 2016, stchrysostoms.wordpress.com/2015/03/15/christ-as-mother/.
Depiction of Christ lactating/oozing blood into a chalice
The swift entry of Christianity onto the medieval stage created shocking changes which made society question the very values of right and wrong. Medieval writers made many attempts to weave Christ into the epics of battle and revenge, but over time Christianity took on a new and unchecked power over societal views of divinity, individuality, and eternity. During the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the emergence of female Christian mystics and religious anchoresses gave way to contrarian views of the conventional ideas of gender at the time and forged a new (yet imperfect) safe haven for women to write, think, and be heard. Due to the difficulty of women obtaining education, social privilege and religious prominence within Christianity offered a female key to the spiritual language used primarily by men during these centuries. The nature of the Catholic religion itself and its own defiances of gender expectations paved the way early on for women’s authority gained by mystic visions.
Gender norms within the Middle Ages
Gender during the medieval period had strict divisions according to sex. For example, in the article “Sexuality, Gender, and the Body in Late Medieval Women’s Spirituality: Cases from Germany and the Netherlands”, Ulrike Wiethaus explains that men were denoted as individuals of “power, judgement, discipline, and reason” and women were associated with the characteristics of “weakness, mercy, lust, and unreason” (Wiethaus 1). Because men had fewer orifices and were generally physically stronger, they were seen as the more dependable, strong, and intellectual out of the two genders. Furthermore, women were associated with physicality and the material world whereas men were seen as closer to the divine.
Mysticism in a broad sense is an alteration of consciousness often paired with a certain ideology or religion.
Though Catholicism may seem outwardly to be an institution which further enforces social tensions and discriminations within gender and race, it was actually the Catholic dogma of Jesus as mother and the metaphor of “human relationships (friendship, fatherhood or motherhood, or erotic love)” which created a rift in conventional thought on divinity, gender, and authority (Bynum 258). Women had very few educational opportunities at the time and were excluded from scriptural interpretation and preaching; therefore mysticism became the only avenue for women during this period to gain authority by means of prophecy and visionary work. Medieval women used the mystic ideal of pairing subjective “revelations” with institutional power and dogma to become authoritative sources of Christian interpretation. Looking forward to the early modern stress on individuality, mystic women used the stereotype of “physicality” to access the male value of “divinity” through Christ. In the Bible and in Catholic teaching, Christ’s physical presence and suffering on Earth as well as his feminine attributes of caregiving and affective emotion brought the divine into the realm of the material and the physical, realms in which mystic women established power.
But how did mystic women gain spiritual authority when their texts are so overtly personally inspired, grandiose, and even sexual? Women who entered the Church as an anchoress were shut away in a service similar to a burial, vowing to spend the rest of their lives in service to God and asceticism. In Amy Hollywood’s article “‘Who Does She Think She Is’: Christian Women’s Mysticism”, she argues that it is humility that grants these women authority: even through their extreme claims. Simone de Beauvoir later writes that this humility merely served to disguise narcissism in their visionary work. This facade of humility is almost inseparable from the role of anchoress that was taken on by both Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe, the latter even referring to herself in her work as “creature”.
Subversion of gender norms
Another way through which these women gained notoriety and power was through their manipulation of gender norms, the female body, and views of the Trinity. The value of physicality traditionally negatively associated with these women actually became a tool; the physical suffering of their bodies through fasting and isolation allowed them to become intermediaries to God. The interpretation of Jesus as a physical sufferer, weak and bloody, confuses gender norms: weakness and “leakiness” were traditionally associated with women, and in this case it can be seen that the deity himself is embodying these qualities. Jesus as mother who lactates and a human who suffered on Earth put into question the negative connotations with these activities in relation to women. This physicality of Jesus Christ meant women could actually wield their materiality and emotional affect to achieve divinity and transcendence, reserved priorly for men. Moreover, sexual relationship with God promotes the freedom of women to be both holy and sexually active at the same time. In The Book of Marjery Kempe, the author wears white and proclaims herself “revirginized” before entering into a marital union with God.
The entry of women into the arena of “high spiritual language” is indubitably due to the popularization of Christianity. Women who entered religious lives as mystics gained education, audience, and authority that had been previously unavailable. Christian bending of gender norms through depictions of Jesus as a mother and human sufferer as well as the tactful manipulation of these openings by mystic medieval Christian women added new voices to the literary canon. These female voices offered fresh and varying interpretations of gender: some writers flipped the dichotomy by embodying traditionally male values while others chose to abolish the dichotomy completely. The visions that generated the spiritual authority these women enjoyed represented a form of liberation from long spanning archaic dismissal of femininity in literature and in faith.
Bibliography
Beonio-Brocchieri, Mariateresa Fumagalli. “The Feminine Mind in Medieval Mysticism.” Creative Women in Medieval and Early Modern Italy: A Religious and Artistic Renaissance, edited by E. Ann Matter and John Coakley, University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 1994, pp. 19–33. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv513627.6.
Bynum, Caroline Walker. “Jesus As Mother And Abbot As Mother.” Medieval Religion, 1977, pp. 20–48., doi:10.4324/9780203328675_chapter_1.
Greenblatt, Stephen, et al. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. A, W.W. Norton, 2018.
Hollywood, Amy. “‘Who Does She Think She Is?’” Theology Today, vol. 60, no. 1, 2003, pp. 5–15., doi:10.1177/004057360306000102.
Thompson, Jennifer. “‘In No Sense a Vision:” Re-Evaluating Affective Piety, Gender, and the Maternal Figuration of Christ in Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love.’” Questia, 2005, “In No Sense a Vision:” Re-Evaluating Affective Piety, Gender, and the Maternal Figuration of Christ in Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love.
Wiethaus, Ulrike. “Sexuality, Gender, and the Body in Late Medieval Women’s Spirituality: Cases from Germany and the Netherlands.” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, vol. 7, no. 1, 1991, pp. 35–52. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/25002144.