Since the Gregorian Reform, the canon law of the Roman Catholic church has excluded women from sacramental power.2 Whatever the reasons behind this eleventh-century move, the exclusion of women coincided with a lowering of the status of women in the official religious life of the Christian church. Only recently has the old debate about women and the priesthood been opened up again in the Catholic church and it is clear that this concern is linked to an awareness that the traditionally unmarried male priest in the Roman church is getting ever older and is not being being replaced by young successors. Women and their talents and needs are at the very centre of the changes going on in Roman Catholic life today, however much recent pronouncements by the pope seem to exclude the possibility that women ever will regain some of the powers they lost in the eleventh century.
As someone brought up in a secure Italian-Irish ghetto of Roman Catholicism in the 1950s in California, I have, since childhood, detected an undercurrent of misogyny in the attitudes towards women that I have detected in the male clergy. Recently on the National Public Radio programme “All Things Considered,” I heard a powerful reassertion of this attitude in a statement by a Roman cardinal who complained about all the marital annulments given out by diocesan courts every year in the United States. The cardinal claimed that the American proclivity for annulments probably was due to the fact that many such diocesan courts had tender-hearted female members who could not say no. I found this statement outrageous, for my experience with women in positions of power is that they are usually more cautious in the exercise of their prerogatives than men. It is dangerous to generalise about anything — especially about the sexes — but the women I have known who are members of the Refugee Board in Denmark (which has the final say about granting or refusing asylum to political refugees from all over the world) are often much more sceptical than the men and much more astute at finding holes in the stories of the asylum applicants. It is understandable that the few women who attain positions of real power — even in a country like Denmark which likes to think of itself as being favourable to women — are thorough and conscientious, for they know that the eyes of the male members of their profession are upon them. So they must be more royalist than the king — or perhaps even more papist than the pope, if that is possible!
Such considerations have been the fruit of my own involvements in the past years with contemporary women — and with their mediæval ancestors. Before I turn to look at some of the male-female power relationships that characterised personal bonds between men in the religious life and holy women in the thirteenth century, I want to point out that I am breaking a self-imposed silence that has lasted for a number of years. Although I have often dealt with male-female relationships in my writings, I have tried only the characterise the male side of the bond.3 During the period 1976-1988 I felt obliged by the anger and creativity of women historians to leave considerations about the world of women to the women. In writing a book on friendship, for example, I deliberately left out female-female bonds and I only dealt with male-female bonds in one direction.4 At the same time, however, I have sensed that the most exciting work going on in mediæval history — especially in the history of mentalities — has come from women writing about women. We all owe a great debt to the historians, both lay and religious, who have traced the development of mediæval spiritual life in its cultural and social context. Caroline Bynum is just the most visible and celebrated of a cluster of women whose sensitivity and acuteness have brought them to the point where they are being looked upon as makers of one of the main currents of mediæval studies today.5
In May of 1989 at the great Medieval Conference at Western Michigan University I attended many of the sessions dealing with women's spirituality, and here I felt an openness to contributions to men. There was no longer either the aggressiveness of the 1970s towards men nor the apologies to women in which some male historians have engaged. As a man I felt accepted as a person, an historian, a potential contributor to a fruitful area of mediæval studies. When the group around Vox Benedictina met on the final day of the Conference and exchanged information and experiences, I had a sense that we had all arrived on a plateau of learning and sharing of knowledge and experience. It has been a long, hard way up to this place, but it is only because we have arrived that I can attempt now to discuss how women experienced the bonds whose definitions and limits were usually set by men in the thirteenth century. I hope this paper will be looked upon more as an invitation to further discussion and debate rather than as any attempt to characterise a milieu in definitive terms. In some senses no piece of research is final, and every generation takes up the debate anew. But in a special sense, I consider my characterisations of male-female bonds as preliminary and open to revision and addition by women and men who are asking questions similar to mine.
The main question I want to ask in what follows concerns the extent to which the contacts between visionary women and religious men in the thirteenth century can be characterised as either friendship or exploitation. In order to deal with these very personal bonds I think it is important to point out how important a role the phrase cura monialium plays.6 It assumes that women are a burden, the weaker sex, the dependents who need to be cared for. Certainly in economic terms, mediæval women in religious communities did need some caring for. Because of enclosure — which was looked upon as a point of departure for the community of women — it was economically necessary for men to represent women and be their liaisons with the outside world.7 As agents or administrators for women, men thought of themselves as their protectors. On one level, women did need protectors, for the level of violence and brutality present in mediæval society was especially high for outsiders who did not fit into any male-defined community. The woman without a protector was a woman liable to be molested or raped, and so it was essential for the perimeters of female religious communities to be marked out and occupied by men. Once this happened, in point of fact, women could on occasion leave the enclosure, and we find thirteenth-century women busy on errands in towns.8 We do not have to think of enclosure as an absolute fact but rather as a definition of the presence of women which provided a clear boundary beyond which uncontrolled male society could not or should not penetrate.
Protection, however, cost money and mediæval women's houses were considered an economic burden to the men's houses, and the men thought of themselves as the protectors of the needs and interests of women. It is the economic factor which time and again emerges as the central consideration for those male communities which dealt with female communities: how much will it cost? Women's houses were generally poorer than those of men, partly due to the fact of enclosure and partly associated with the fact of dependence. Since women could not farm the land, they had to depend upon men to do such work for them, or else they had to find “cottage industries” and forms of production which could be adopted to the interior life of their communities. Part of their surplus was taken up by the men who looked after them or worked for them. One wonders even today if religious houses of women would not be better off financially if the women were able to make economic decisions on their own, without having to confer with men and bow to their wishes.9 In the Middle Ages, however, there could be no question: dependence was the point of departure for all women's houses, at least after the Gregorian Reform.
Women were also enclosed because of the traditional male clerical fear of women as sex. Men projected their sexual fantasies and desires on women and felt that religious women had best be hidden away so that they, the men, would not be tempted. The sexual motive, however, should not be over-emphasised, for it needs to be added that there had long been a debate concerning to what extent men could gain spiritual enrichment from contact with women. The collection of Wilfrid-Boniface's letters provide ample testimony to the power and durability of the bonds between the eighth century Anglo-Saxon missionaries and the great abbesses and loving nuns they had left behind.10 But by the twelfth century, Aelred of Rievaulx, deeply committed to the Gregorian Reform, could in his Rule of Life for a Recluse, warn his spiritual daughter against frequent contacts with men:
Never allow messages to pass between you and any man, whatever the pretext, whether to show him kindness, to arouse his fervour, or to seek spiritual friendship and intimacy with him. Never accept letters or small gifts from a man, nor send them yourself. It is a common custom now to send a young monk or priest a belt, a gaily embroidered purse, or some such thing, but this only fosters illicit affections and can cause great harm.11
In these lines Aelred indicates that the well-known custom described in eighth-century letters of exchanging small gifts accompanying letters of friendship and spiritual advice was continuing in the twelfth century. Such an indication warns us against any claim that the Gregorian Reform eliminated the male-female bonds in the church that had been present and vital for centuries. One can only say that such bonds now became much more self-conscious and needed to be defended more openly, as we find in the Life of Christina of Markyate where the affectionate bond between Christina and the powerful abbot of Saint Albans — and especially their frequent meetings — are said to have created a great deal of gossip and inspired the rumour that the two were lovers.12 In the post-Gregorian self-consciousness of the twelfth century, Roger of Saint Albans could not appeal to earlier precedents for such friendships. His attachment to Christina continued in spite of the protests and scepticism which surrounded him.
Such personal bonds need to be seen in an institutional context. Male “protectors” had something to offer the women under their wing, for they gave them a legitimacy and a structure which women badly needed at a time when the church as a whole did not offer many possibilities for those women who felt a spiritual calling which did not involve marriage and motherhood. It is increasingly recognised today that the Cistercians, once famed for their refusal to admit women's houses into their order during their first century of existence, did in fact keep close links with houses of women from almost the very first years.13 These houses were maintained on a local level and were not officially recognised by the General Chapter at Cîteaux until the end of the twelfth century, although the women were there practically from the start. The informality combined with attention to women still baffles historians who want to categorise the women's houses that were definitely Cistercian. Recent research, however, continues to emphasise the near-impossibility of giving any final verdict on whether a number of women's houses were Cistercian or not, even after the institutional opening of the late twelfth century.14 But institutional acceptance was an important step for the male Cistercians and in the furtherance of personal bonds: once it was seen that the monks had to deal with the cura mulierum, monks could openly seek out women as spiritual advisors, confidantes, friends. In so doing, such men witnessed to the fact that just as much as the women were made to need them in economic and social terms, they as men needed women in personal and emotional terms.
The Cistercians are famous for bringing their brothers and fathers with them to the monastery in a great reversal of the monastic tradition that conversion to a new life meant leaving behind bonds of family and kinship. Monks had of course always been involved in their carnal families, but with the Cistercians and especially with Bernard and his family, the old commonplace of separation and abandonment took on a new meaning. Bernard also cared for his sister's spiritual life and saw to it that she eventually joined a house of women.15 This precedent was remembered by later generations of Cistercians, among whom it seems to have been acceptable even to leave the monastery to look after family members who were on the verge of life decisions. In the Life of Abundus of Huy, written at the Brabant house of Villers in the 1230s, we find active involvement by the saintly male figure in the fate of his sister and her choice of a way of life. There is no indication in the text that Abundus's decision to leave the monastery in order to go home to his family was considered unorthodox. On the contrary, Abundus's involvement with his sister is treated as a natural part of his vocation as a monk:
... a revelation came to him from God and taught him that a sister of his, Mary by name, a girl of comely build, as being proposed by her father for the knotty bonds of wedlock.
Such a proposal left him very ill at ease, for he well knew how those under the covenant and law of wedlock are often preoccupied with sundry cares and have little chance to spend leisure on the Lord. And so he thought of a plan of action, one which he also brought to a happy conclusion. It consisted in getting his abbot's permission ...16
Abundus first went to a well-known abbess and arranged that she be accepted into her house. Then he went home to his family and had a talk with his sister. In all these movements he can be looked upon as being extremely patronising, full of a holy zeal that reminds one of the determination of St. Bernard himself. But in Abundus's enthusiasm to convince his sister to join a religious house instead of getting married, he did not denigrate the value of marriage. In harmony with his own age's acceptance of marriage as a worthy state of life, he simply asked his sister to seek what he considered to be a more perfect marriage:
Wedlock is a thing I praise, a thing instituted by God; but what impresses me in wedlock is the multiple danger it presents for the soul's salvation. Now you also could profit by considering such dangers more closely. Your father is fleshly and he cares for you in a fleshly manner, and so he aims to join you in marriage to a fleshly husband, one fleshly-minded, an earthly husband, subject to death. I, on the other hand, care for you in Christ Jesus, with a charity at once brotherly and spiritual; I would like to dedicate you as a bride stably wedded to a heavenly Groom, not at all subject to death. And if you ask how that could be, let me inform you that I have already obtained for you a prebend and a living at the monastery of La Ramee, enabling you to take a nun's habit there, remaining a virgin and entering the service of Christ.7
Just as Abundus had defied his biological father in entering the monastery, he now was defying his father in arranging for his sister to enter a monastery. He had even made the necessary practical arrangements for her. I wonder if this story is part of an ongoing Cistercian discussion in the 1230s about the involvement of male religious with women. The Cistercian General Chapter had in the 1220s tried to limit the commitment of male houses to female ones and forbade the abbots to take on any new houses of women.18 There was a general fear, even at a committed place like Villers in Brabant, that the supply of experienced, mature monks would be exhausted by the need for them as chaplains and administrators at the many women's houses.19 In this debate the author of The Life of Abundus seems to take a clear stand in considering involvement with women a natural part of the spiritual life of the monks. However much we may be taken aback by Abundus's ability to determine his sister's life without asking her first, we must take into consideration how his involvement could have been a response both to an emerging bourgeois family structure and to a monastic fear of bonds to women. Abundus's father tried both with him and his sister Mary to see that they followed the new accepted patterns: the boy was to become a skilled merchant, the girl a loyal wife to a man accepted by the family. But Abundus had other plans and ultimately his father had to surrender completely, at least according to the chanter Goswin of Villers, the probably author of the account who most likely had the story only from Abundus himself. In his view, his father caved in immediately when he showed up at home and involved himself:
... a fear then came upon the father, a fear lest he be an impediment to his daughter's salvation, punishable by an avenging visitation from God. The following day therefore, when his son once again began to press his plea, he softened and, in a mood of loving-kindness, broke into tears with the words: “My son, I do not wish, I do not dare, to oppose yourself or my daughter. Then again, I am persuaded that my daughter's conversion would be pleasing to God and to the Blessed Virgin.”20
Abundus could not leave his sister alone. His freedom in leaving the monastery and in determining her fate provide an illuminating commentary on the involvement of Cistercian monks with female members of their family in the first half of the thirteenth century.
This phenomenon of involvement went, of course, beyond the Cistercian Order. It involved secular priests and religious from many different orders, and it can be looked upon as a reaction to the extreme caution and pessimism about women in the religious life that had emerged from the Gregorian Reform. I would even contend that the century from 1050 to 1150 was almost a brief pause in an otherwise continuing involvement between men and women in the Christian church. After 1050 women's sacramental power was clipped but emotional-spiritual involvements continued and burst forth, as it were, after about 1150. Here Hildegard of Bingen and the fascination she exercised on Bernard of Clairvaux and the Cistercians of Villers provided a transitional role in functioning as the visionary who has to be heard. In going to Hildegard, the monks asked for a direct approach to God, the theological fruits of mystical experience, something they could not reach so immediately in their own lives.21 Women like Hildegard and Elisabeth of Schönau had something that devout men sought and needed: the immediacy of contact with the divine, as well as the language in which to convey this presence.
Hildegard had it all, but she was a formidable figure, distant and even terrifying in her aloneness. But other women became available as monks sought them out. In doing so, they were often asking themselves about their motives, whether they looked to women for some kind of sexual gratification, whether direct or indirect. A common view of the Middle Ages as naive about the possibility of sexual involvement in religious bonds needs to be replaced by a sense of the subtleness and keenness of distinctions that men made in their relationships with women. Again we can turn to the Life of Abundus for illumination. Here there are reflections of an ongoing discussion about the possibility of spiritual friendships and mutual guidance without direct sexual contact. The author of the Life refers to a vision that Abundus had in which he saw a well-known cleric, John of Nivelles, who was famed for his close friendships with women. The cleric took the opportunity to tell Abundus that he never had had any problems with the women to whom he had become spiritually close:
I was God's helper in frequent dealings with some religious women, and I had with them a holy familiarity, for I took pains to console the fainthearted and to hear the confessions of them all. In such confessions the sins that were laid bare often had their unclean aspects, which tickled the flesh to wanton revelry, but all this I used to convert into matter for virtue. Hence, though I stood amid this conflagration of the flesh, I was never scorched by its flames but held fast to my chastity ...22
John of Nivelles admitted to temptation but said he could face it and deal with it. The fact that he could fantasise about women did not mean he was helpless in the face of them, and the possibility of sexual contact did not mean that he as a spiritual guide had to give up women. In such remarks there is sensitivity to the contents of such bonds. Abundus encouraged openness about the matter, as when he spoke to a man who went to him for help because his spiritual love for a nun had turned into physical attraction:
Now any excessive familiarity of man to woman or woman to man can become a stumbling block and an occasion of sin for either of them, and that is clearly what happened to this man. In fact, the spiritual love he had been showing the girl now turned into fleshly love.23
I see a debate going on at Villers in the early thirteenth century about the degree of commitment to women that was advisable, and in this biography we get a reflection of the contribution that Abundus may have made to the debate. By the end of the twelfth century is had been realised in Cistercian circles that men could acknowledge the role of women in their spiritual lives and turn to them. The women who fascinated monks were not so much intellectuals as people whose intuition and visions gave new perspectives to the spiritual life. For us the question remains: how did men approach such women and who made use of whom? In order to respond, we can look at three lives of holy women from the period and the people behind them: The Life of Marie d'Oignies by James de Vitry, The Life of Lutgard of Aywières by Thomas of Cantimpré, and finally The Life of Beatrice of Nazareth, probably written by the nuns' chaplain.
James de Vitry wrote the life of Marie shortly after her death in 1211. He was not a Cistercian but was close to the Cistercian monasteries of Brabant that became instrumental in the order's opening to women. Marie is remembered as the founder of the beguine movement, and it was thanks to James that her life and inspiration got a European audience.24 Marie had changed his life and attracted him away from the growing intellectual specialisation of the Paris academic milieu to a house of Augustinian Canons near Oignies where he could be close to her. James went on to become a cardinal and a key figure in the ongoing reform of the Church that characterised the first decades of the thirteenth century, until the battle with the German king became the major concern in the 1220s.
There is no doubt that James loved Marie dearly, and his affection for her emerges in what is perhaps the best biography we have of a mediaeval holy woman.25 But in his devotion there is an element of curiosity, a desire to find out about the exact nature of her spiritual gifts, as when James asked her about the floods of tears that could come from and whether or not she got headaches from them.26 Like so many men before and since, James had to analyse the nature of the experience and to classify it. He was not trained in the Paris schools for nothing. And so he described how he, on occasion, gave Marie an unconsecrated host to see if she instinctively or divinely could tell the difference between it and the real thing. Marie got violently sick from the bread, and this, for James, proved the totality of her devotion to the consecrated host.27 He was satisfied, while we are left with a sense that he was using his saint and friend as a guinea pig. The story is by no means uncommon in the thirteenth century. Caesarius of Heisterbach has similar ones, and it is supposed to be edificatory that a woman can tell the difference.28 For us, however, with our sense of the way women have subjected themselves to male categories and definitions, Marie becomes an object manipulated by James.29
James would not have thought of himself as indulging his curiosity. Such tests, he would have asserted, were necessary in order to prove the veracity of her devotion. He thought of himself as a defender of Marie's reputation, and he gladly included stories that provided witnesses to her authenticity. This is the case, for example, with the story of a vision James said came to a Cistercian monk who saw Bernard of Clairvaux as a seraph embracing Marie.30 James concedes that many clerics thought of her as something of an hysteric, but such visions provided indications of her inclusion in the protection of a saint already celebrated for his mystical theology.
As far as James was concerned, Marie was a master of theology, but here he qualified himself. He claimed that she did not really know what she intuited and that after her periods of revelation, she would be confused. She would excuse herself and apologise to those around her for being the way she was.31 As far as James is concerned, Marie was only a master when she was in a trance. Because of this insight, she knew others much better than she knew herself, something that James felt obliged to explain in order to defend her against the charges of those who thought of her as only chasing flies or butterflies.
Marie's involvements with her friends brought fasts, prayers and talks with them. James appreciated her concern, and most of all he himself needed to share her presence and words. He needed her to evaluate his sermons and to tell him that he was too caught up in himself. But at the same time, as he describes how he turned to Marie for her reactions to his preaching, James emphasises that she did not really understand what he was saying.32 Since she could not be a preacher herself, he says, she admired preachers and even clutched their garments as relics of divine power. At one and the same time, he shows his dependence on Marie and denigrates the seriousness of her insights, at least when it comes to his preaching. She is a “natural” for him, and as such she is taken seriously and unseriously at one and the same time.
James again contradicts himself when he sees Marie as volunteering to help people and yet at the same time forcing herself to do so. He claims she had to do violence against herself and would rather spit blood than disturb the peace of the brothers or the pilgrims who came to her for advice.33 It is as if he wanted Marie to be the centre of a community of admirers while he also wanted to see her as being apart, forcing herself to look after the needs of others
Where is Marie in this portrait? It is hard to say, for she is seen so much as responding to the needs of James himself. But some of the anecdotes perhaps do witness at close hand the power she could exercise over the men who came to her because of her insights. When a young Cistercian monk was brought to her who was depressed, she prayed for him. He said the Confiteor and black stones came out of his mouth as he spoke each word.34 The meeting with Marie we would interpret as a session of spiritual therapy. Marie enabled the youth to open up about himself. Yet even here we do not know how Marie reacted in such a situation: did she have to compel herself to listen to the youth, or was she a distant figure, praying for him but not really engaging in a dialogue with him?
James saw himself in his life and in his writings as Marie's defender against all the churchmen who questioned her authority and veracity. In order to do so, he felt entitled to check her out, seeing how far her revelations went. For us his invasions of her privacy seem hard to accept, and it appears on the surface of the biography that he was setting all the ground rules. But there is no doubt that this masculine aggressiveness could be fruitful, as we can see in the story of how a Cistercian monk after Marie's death saw in a dream a golden chalice coming out of her mouth. Marie gave of the contents of the chalice to some of her friends to drink.35 She was not giving her spiritual nourishment away at random. It was for those to whom she felt close, but they got a very good meal indeed. This is the way James, of course, defended Marie's reputation and memory, but it is also the way he remembered her as she had been to him and to other men. In this biography we find what I would call a spiritual power struggle. James needed Marie for his own completeness, but Marie inevitably needed James as a male and a cleric to interpret and defend her in a society grown wary of any expression in which heresy might be latent.
Marie could at times amaze him and act in opposition to his expectations. James could admire Marie and patronise her. In the very suggestiveness of such a biography we catch the shadow of what had been a potent relationship in a sharing of interior lives.
Lutgard died a Cistercian nun in 1246. During her Cistercian period from 1230-46, the Dominican Thomas of Cantimpré says he was her most intimate friend.36 As with James and Marie, it is hard to detect the exact nature of the relationship, except for the fact that Lutgard seems to have been able to exercise more control over her spiritual friend than Marie had done. This aspect of the relationship is brought out in an almost humorous description of Thomas's eagerness to get a sizeable relic of Lutgard's body, a goal that Lutgard herself was not so keen to realise for Thomas. He may well have been using self-irony when he described his conversation with Lutgard, but he still very much wanted a chunk of her body. As he says, he said to her:
“Nothing, Mother, no part of your body, would be enough for me, were it not a whole hand or the head itself; only that could alleviate my bereavement.”
But Lutgard had other plans:
... with her countenance serene as ever, she smiled and put forward her right little finger, laying it on the sill of the window at which we were conversing, and she said: “Enough and sufficient for you if after my death you get this one finger!37”
Thomas got precisely what Lutgard promised him, nothing more or less. In death as often in life, she got her way. And yet Thomas could often treat her as an object, just as James had done with Marie. He described how her hair changed colour when she was having a vision,38 and he reminds us again and again in his narrative that he thought of her as a kind of sacred territory, with a body that was a pathway to heaven and thus worthy of exploration.
Thomas needed Lutgard as his “most special mother” as he called her. He could go to her because he felt bothered by what he had heard in confessions.39 In his seeking out of her as a counsellor he seems to have been more clear about his relationship with her than James did with Marie. We can wonder how much Lutgard wanted this closeness. The only indication is Thomas's remark that when she was blind in the last eleven years of her life, she said she regretted that she could not see her spiritual friends any longer.40 This may be Thomas's own wishful thinking, but Lutgard strikes the reader as having an element of control over her own life that we do not find with the seemingly more naive Marie. This sense of being able to cope with men is praiseworthy in the eyes of Thomas, who says it was good she kept a physical distance to men and set an example to women not to let themselves be sexually exploited by men:
Turning now to you, O virgin bride of Christ, O lover of chastity, whoever you may be, I bid you, like Lutgard, flee such persons, be horrified at their disgraceful conduct.
If any man wishes to solicit you as for the Holy Kiss or if he tries to move his hand up close to your bosom, to your breasts or to other parts, repay his kisses with spitting and his fondling with a fist in the face.
Defer to no cleric or other personage in this, since chastity of the mind has a right to defend itself with blows, just as does life of the body.41
Lutgard had refused to share the kiss of peace with the Abbot of Saint Trond. The event had caused a minor scandal, but Thomas defended her for her refusal. He saw in her a strength of will that emerged from her spiritual life, and so he wanted to defend her against her attackers. Some people, he wrote, think it is unworthy to write about the fantastic visions of insignificant women.42 Thomas may be defending himself here as much as Lutgard, but he succeeds in showing her independence of mind and decisiveness in leading her nuns. However much we have to concede that this is yet another life of a woman set forth on male conditions, a female figure emerges who is very much “her own man.”
Beatrice died in 1268 as prioress of Nazareth. Her biography was probably written by a man who did not know her but who collected the tradition about her to be found at her house, as was the case in the biography of Ida of Nivelles, her friend and confidante, a few decades earlier.43 The only man I find as central in Beatrice's life is her father, who followed her through her career and influenced it greatly, for he is supposed to have founded three houses for women, and it was at the third one, Nazareth, that she became prioress.
Beatrice's biography gives one the distinct impression that Jesus was enough for her. She did counsel men who came to her, but she is not seen as being dependent upon men for help and advice in return. This happens in one fascinating case, however, in which she goes to a male advisor to ask whether she should feign madness in order to distance herself from her religious community.44 Beatrice's problem in obtaining solitude in her life was not centred on men but on women: they were her friends, and they were the ones who normally came to her for advice and consolation.
Behind the Latin biography of Beatrice is her own Flemish autobiography which is forever lost to us, but which can be partially reconstructed through the Latin. One can easily distinguish between Beatrice's original descriptions of her life and later additions that provide commentary, criticism or praise. If we peel away the Latin tradition, we find a woman who concentrated on her visions and her friendships with other women. Roger de Ganck, whose studies of Beatrice have already put a new focus on our understanding of her, thinks that she underwent an adolescent crisis which was partially resolved by her tutelage under Ida of Nivelles at whose monastery of La Ramee she learned to copy manuscripts.45 Once back in her own community of sisters, Beatrice formed strong friendships with other women. However much we can assume that such bonds were not unusual in a mediæval house for women, it is unusual for them to be described. This is probably the result of the concerns of the original autobiography. Beatrice was writing for the sisters of her own community and so wanted to describe her relations with them. Her own sibling, Christina, succeeded Beatrice as prioress and clearly wanted to keep the memory of her biological and spiritual sister alive, and so the autobiography written in the vulgar tongue was turned into a more acceptable biography. Here, in opposition to the lives written exclusively by men, we are given a look inside the everyday life of a female community and told about interrelationships. Beatrice is defined in terms of her bonds with women and only secondarily through her relationships with men.46
Such an emphasis hints that in the earlier biographies, the male writers to some extent projected themselves and their own needs on their female friends and so left out the inner world of the women they knew. The first two biographies tell us as much about James and Thomas as they do about Marie and Lutgard, while Beatrice's biography brings us to a sense of the relative spiritual independence and emotional interdependence of women in a religious community in the thirteenth century.47
Three biographies of women, no matter how acute, do not prove anything about the exact relationships between male churchmen and female visionaries in the thirteenth century. But these works at least provide a point of departure for further considerations about male-female interrelationships in the religious life. Sometimes women to a certain extent could define the limits of their relationships. They could reject the physical advances of men, even the kiss of peace. Women could protest that men did not have sufficient respect for the integrity of their bodies. In this reaction I do not find prudishness, rather a sense of control. Women had their space, a cloister of their own, and this communal space was perhaps the closest a mediæval woman could come to obtaining Virginia Woolf's proverbial “room of one's own and a hundred pounds a year.” Men could not penetrate this space, just as they could not penetrate the bodies of women and make them subject to male demands for male heirs. Women could be set apart because they wanted to be integral and unassailable.
Within this “free space” women could develop their own spiritual language in the thirteenth century through a landscape of visions that men could not pass by or ignore. When the men came to listen to the visions, they often showed a shallow curiosity or a penchant for cheap thrills, but at times through conversations and discovery of women's spiritual resources, they could replace scepticism with respect.
What fascinates me here most of all was the way such holy women were able to use their bodies as sources of power. Caroline Bynum has already dealt at length with how food could become a means whereby women could maintain their integrity and, at the same time, preserve a distance to men.48 But intake of food was only one of the many paths to spiritual power for mediaeval visionary women. Their bodily functions could become potent vocabularies. We find flows of tears and emissions of blood that show immense reservoirs of power. The men who described these excretions would have us believe that they often were involuntary, but I wonder to what extent women could exercise them at will in order to signal to their surrounding that they were in a territory where they could exercise their own discretion, beyond the rational categories of men. However much mediæval (and modern) men have tried to analyse these experiences, I think we have often ended only in asserting our own fascination with intuitions and insights that we rarely have been able to exercise ourselves.49
Here it is important to point out the subtlety with which women like Lutgard and Marie could exercise such power over themselves and their surroundings. One cannot dismiss their spiritual visions and the physical phenomena that accompanied them as classic expressions of hysteria or of some transferred type of sexual orgasm. There is an eroticism in the totality of the involvement of such women, and yet their ecstasies cannot be easily translated into something exclusively sexual. I think we are only beginning to understand the independence and stamina of such women. Their force of will and self-taught language of visionary expression provide an entirely different understanding of thirteenth century religion than the classic view of Gilson that everything leads up to the scholastic theology of Thomas Aquinas.
Preliminarily I would claim that some men realised that women could be important to them as friends and confidantes and these men thought of themselves as necessary defenders of such women. There were manipulation and power-play on both sides: we can see the male role more easily than the female one, while in Beatrice we find a woman who succeeded in creating a distance between herself and all men except Jesus.
In almost any human relationship there is bound to be a struggle for dominance. This tension is not necessarily detrimental to the bond and can indeed contribute to its strengthening. In creative tension and mutual questioning, a friendship can be deepened. I find great respect and wonder in mediæval male biographers for their female subjects, but even more importantly these accounts, as it were by accident, show us how women through their visions got a degree of control and decision over the content of their own lives. In seeking to live out the Christian gospel, women became more than their mediaeval biological fate of being subject to the demands of family, the whims of their husbands, and the dangers of childbirth. One can only stand back at a distance from these women of power and admit how they adapted a harsh male legal system emerging from the Gregorian Reform into a way of life that gave them room to manoeuvre. In the blood, tears, visions and friendships of such women we find moments when male-female friendships could rise above power-play and exploitation.