Promised Bodies: Time, Language, and Corporeality in Medieval Women's Mystical Texts

By Patricia Dailey

In Christianity, the body is a potentially transformative vehicle, and the writings of Hadewijch of Brabant, a thirteenth-century beguine, engage with this tradition in ways both singular to her mysticism and indicative of her theological milieu. This study links the embodied poetics of Hadewijch's visions and letters to the work of such mystics and visionaries as Julian of Norwich, Hildegard of Bingen, and Marguerite of Oingt. It introduces new criteria for re-assessing the style, language, interpretative practices, forms of literacy, and uses of textuality in women's mystical texts.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Release date: Sep 3, 2013
• ISBN: 9780231535526

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PROMISED BODIES

Gender, Theory, & Religion

Gender, Theory, & Religion

Amy Hollywood, Editor

The Gender, Theory, and Religion series provides a forum for interdisciplinary scholarship at the intersection of the study of gender, sexuality, and religion.

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Jennifer Wright Knust

Naming the Witch: Magic, Ideology, and Stereotype in the Ancient World,

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L. Stephanie Cobb

Between a Man and a Woman? Why Conservatives Oppose Same-Sex Marriage,

Ludger H. Viefhues-Bailey

PROMISED BODIES

TIME, LANGUAGE, & CORPOREALITY IN MEDIEVAL WOMEN’S MYSTICAL TEXTS

Patricia Dailey

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS

NEW YORK

Columbia University Press

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Copyright © 2013 Columbia University Press

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E-ISBN 978-0-231-53552-6

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Dailey, Patricia.

Promised bodies: time, language, and corporeality in medieval women’s mystical texts / Patricia Dailey.

   pages cm. — (Gender, theory, and religion)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-231-16120-6 (cloth: alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-231-53552-6 (e-book)

1. Mysticism—History—Middle Ages, 600–1500. 2. Women mystics. 3. Christian literature—Women authors—History and criticism. I. Title.

BV5080.D35 2013

248.2'2082—dc23

2012050242

Jacket design: Jordan Wannemacher

Jacket image: Noli me tangre. Fra Angelico Ca. 1440–1445. Fresco © Scala/Art Resources

A Columbia University Press E-book.

CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at [e-mail].

References to Web sites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

TO MY MOTHER

& MY DAUGHTER,

MY TWO SOPHIA ELEANORS

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

INTRODUCTION

1. CHILDREN OF PROMISE, CHILDREN OF THE FLESH: AUGUSTINE’S TWO BODIES

2. THE MYSTIC’S TWO BODIES: THE TEMPORAL AND MATERIAL POETICS OF VISIONARY TEXTS

3. WERKE AND THE POSTSCRIPTUM OF THE SOUL

4. LIVING SONG: DWELLING IN HADEWIJCH’S LIEDEREN

CONCLUSION

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

BOOKS THAT have spanned a long time in their making are oft en indebted to people, events, seminars, publications, institutions, and encounters that are noted and archived, as well as to those inadvertent and almost happenstance occasions that could—and do—easily slip from the field of vision. Beginning from the moment I reached for the volume entitled The Complete Works of Hadewijch on a slow day while working in the Abbey Bookstore in Paris in 1989—and determined shortly thereafter that it would be the subject of any future academic endeavor I might undertake—many such lacunae punctuate the memory of my work with Hadewijch. I have not, however, forgotten the question of my MA adviser when I declared to her that I wanted to work on women’s mystical texts: Is that really literature? I am, in some odd way, indebted to that unintentionally provocative question.

This book has, at various moments in its making, benefited from the following support: the hospitality of the Huntington Library; a visiting professorship from the UCSIA Foundation at the University of Antwerp; a Columbia University Junior Faculty Development Grant; a Morton Bloomfield Fellowship from the English Department at Harvard University; a Woodrow Wilson Postdoctoral Fellowship at Northwestern University’s Kaplan Institute for the Humanities; and a Cardinal Flahiff Fellowship at the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies. Versions of chapters were presented at the University of Antwerp, Yale University, UC Riverside, Harvard University, Princeton University, Southern Connecticut State University, and Northwestern University. I am very thankful for the support from these institutions and for the hospitality and helpful criticism of the individuals there. I would also like to express my appreciation to the Warner Fund at the University Seminars at Columbia University for their help in publication. The ideas presented have benefited from discussions in the University Seminars on Cultural Memory.

Above all, I would like to thank Amy Hollywood, whose thoughtful and provocative discussions, meticulous attention to many draft s, and generosity with her time, support, scholarship, and friendship were essential to making this a better book. I owe great thanks to Nicholas Watson, whose invaluable comments strengthened this book immensely, and to Claire Waters, who read and reread the manuscript with care and tireless insight and provided tremendous guidance for the process of revision. Sally Poor’s comments and support aided earlier versions of several chapters and were critical in helping me refine my argument. I would especially like to thank Susan Boynton, for her unceasing generosity, friendship, and attention to draft s; Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer, for their loving friendship, thoughts, and everything else on scales big and small; Veerle Fraeters, for her advice and corrections in the translations from Middle Dutch; Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe, Kees Schepers, Jim Rhodes, Andrea Denny-Brown, Catherine Sanok, Anna Kelner, and Ying Ling Tiong, for their insight and encouragement along the way; and Chris Baswell, Susan Crane, Jean Howard, Bruce Robbins, and Julie Peters, for their many comments.

A special thanks to Lauren Mancia, Abigail Kret, Jillian Tan, and William Jacobs, who helped with footnotes, sources, and other painstaking work, and without whom this book would have hobbled along at a much slower pace. Thank you to Heather Jones for indexing. In the very early stirrings of this project, Ann Hutchison, Robert Sweetman, and Geert Claassens offered very helpful advice. I am also indebted to the participants in the Medieval Writing Workshop and to the editorial team at Columbia University Press, especially Wendy Lochner, senior executive editor, Christine Dunbar, assistant editor, Kerri Cox Sullivan, copy editor, and Susan Pensak, senior manuscript editor.

I cannot sufficiently recognize the tireless help and friendship of Marilyn McLaren and the eternal support of Douglas Wade, who built the desk on which the first glimmers of this project became lucid. The process was made all the more felicitous by the friendship of Alessia Ricciardi, Monique David-Ménard, Natasha Korda, Felix Ensslin, Cornelia Nixon, Mark Strand, Claire Nancy, Anne Ellett, Winifred Amaturo, Penelope Deutscher, Paul Strohm, Horacio Amigorena, Sandro Marpillero, Linda Pollak, Laurie Traktman, Antonella Moscati, and Clemens Härle. I also want to recognize the untraceable labor of a group of women without whom this book would not have emerged from its promised state: Regina Antwi, Silvia Gutierrez, Susana Macias, Rosita Monzon, Maria Triminius, and Joanne Trapp.

Finally, I would like to recognize the late Jean-François Lyotard—who knew well before I did, in 1991, what the seed of this book was—for teaching me of the responsibility associated with writing; and the late Jacques Derrida, who drove me to reiterate this in my own way.

Immeasurable gratitude to my mother, in the past promise of her present person, who ceaselessly believed in me, and to my darling Sophia, for telling me, at age two: Get to work!

ABBREVIATIONS

Source text extracts throughout the volume are taken from the following works.

INTRODUCTION

Corps, corpus, corpus hoc est une intraitable folie.

—JEAN-LUC NANCY

THE BODY

SEEKING TO understand embodiment in medieval women’s religious literature is a complex undertaking, in part because it invokes a sensibility that seems so familiar and at the same time remains so foreign to our own. When Hadewijch of Brabant, a beguine mystic of the thirteenth century, writes of unity with Christ in her Vision 7, she does so in terms that seem to place an emphasis on the immediacy of the body and the palpability of the human figure of Christ, rendering divinity concrete and erotically charged. Writing in her native Middle Dutch, she reports:

He came in the likeness and clothing of a man as he was on the day when he gave us his body for the first time; looking like a human being and a man, sweet and beautiful, and with glorious appearance. … After that he came himself to me, took me entirely in his arms, and pressed me to him; and all my members were satisfied in his full felicity, as my heart desired in my humanity. So I was outwardly satisfied and fully transported.

(CW, 281)¹

This vision of union with Christ, cited by many scholars, frames her body and Christ’s in ways that appear uncannily familiar. Christ is gloriously incarnate: while his body reflects the splendor of his divinity, he is tangible to Hadewijch according the very measure of her own humanity, just as Hadewijch’s humanity and eroticized femininity seem to reflect the measure of our own gendered and embodied persons. Even if we take into account the complexities associated with the sacramental framing of this vision (intentionally omitted here) and the mediating nature of visions in general, part of the difficulty in properly discerning embodiment in this vision and in women’s mysticism generally lies with the complexity of the concept of embodiment itself as understood within the Christian tradition.

In the Christian tradition, the body is not conceived of as a simple organic unity, but rather as a twofold entity partaking of two anthropological registers—the inner and the outer persons—that promises to find its true materiality in a time to come. The body is therefore not conceptualized as a fixed entity, but as a potentially transformative vehicle; not as a biologically discrete organism, but as a dynamic mirror that can reflect the work of the divine within and substantially alter its own materiality if receptive to divine grace. What appears to be a simple representation of symbolic unity expressed in corporeal terms in Hadewijch’s Vision 7 draws upon the language and registers of inner and outer persons to reflect this theological complexity, making the vision far more difficult to delimit with regard to the nature of embodiment. The writings of Hadewijch engage with this tradition in sophisticated ways, ways that are both singular to her mysticism and shared with the theological milieu of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Even more significantly, her way of engaging with and singling herself out from her theological context offer us, as I hope to show in this book, a new means for reading women’s mysticism.

Hadewijch has been a central figure in the redefinition of women’s mysticism and of spirituality in general over the past thirty years. In her seminal work, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (1987), Caroline Walker Bynum invokes the passage cited above from Hadewijch’s vision to highlight a physicality pervasive in women’s spirituality. Although Bynum is not using the twofold distinction of the body I outlined above, she notes that, given the commonplace Christian association of the flesh with femininity (and the soul with masculinity), women were able to use this gendered identification as a means to redeem their experience of the body in the name of all of humanity. For Bynum, this identification was theologically productive: the association of the body with imitatio Christi obscured distinctions between body and soul, distinctions relevant to the twofold dimension of the body I emphasize. She writes:

Subsuming the male/female dichotomy into the more cosmic dichotomy divine/human, women saw themselves as the symbol for all humanity. … In the erotic passage from Hadewijch, humanity (menscheit) clearly implies body: and all my members felt his in full felicity, in accordance with the desire of my heart and my humanity. Such usage tended both to obscure any sharp sense of a body/soul dichotomy (for both body and soul were human) and to imply that humanness intimately involved physicality. It was this sense of humanity as entailing bodiliness (although not reducible to it) that women expressed in expanding the male/female dichotomy from spirit/flesh to divine/human.²

Bynum’s association of women’s spirituality with an incarnational theology marked a critical turning point in the way in which these texts—and bodies—would be read over the next decades. That women’s spirituality emphasizes embodied practices, practices that conflate or obscure distinctions between body and soul, is a claim I will analyze in this book in different terms. Bynum’s attention to embodiment has defined a field, yet where she sees embodiment as essentially related to gender, I will look at embodiment in non-gender-specific terms, reassessing the value of gender as a category.³ The critical discussions that followed Bynum’s work will help contextualize the rationale for my approach.

Even before Bynum, different iterations of the interrelation between gender, embodiment, and mysticism were put forth by French feminists such as Simone de Beauvoir, Julia Kristeva, and Luce Irigaray, who were oft en attempting to articulate a difference in the signifying nature of women’s bodies or in the way female subjectivity articulated (nonphallocentric) transcendence.⁴ Irigaray cites Hadewijch’s Lied 8 as a model for how an immanence in women’s embodiment enacts a transcendence that figures according to the same Trinitarian model for men. At the same time Jacques Lacan footnotes Hadewijch in Encore as a model of feminine sexuality and the nonrelation of woman to her embodied specificity.⁵ In the United States, a different strain of criticism responded to critical investment in the mystic’s body. Sarah Beckwith’s essay on the Ancrene Wisse, Passionate Regulation (1994), counters a materialist feminism that identified with and celebrated the body in medieval women’s religious literature by assuming what she describes as a naive identification with the body:

Although women have historically borne the burden of representing immanence for others, that does not give them privileged access to the body as a woman’s symbol, for women do not have particular forms of representation that are exclusively their own, but only particular relations to cultural representation and discourse. … Medieval women’s religiosity has itself arguably become an imaginary realm for feminist criticism, and it has become so partly through an idealized relation that it is presumed to have with the body, the natural symbol here produced in all its ontological simplicity and in all of its capacities to be just what it is. Once again, a shortcut has been taken, bypassing an opportunity to elucidate, in the history of the present, an ethics not of the pure subject (a newly ascetic feminism?), but of ambiguity.⁶

For Beckwith, all this interest in the body was, in a sense, far too empirically determined. In assuming a given materiality—that of an organic body shared by women or by humanity at large—feminists fail to take into account the psychic, cultural, and regulatory processes that produced embodiment as both subjectively experienced and culturally determined, mistaking the promised body for a natural product. Where Beckwith turned to Freud, Foucault, Bourdieu, and Lacan, among others, to demonstrate how devotional texts enact an imaginary anatomy, a body image, which is itself neither mind nor body, neither purely social nor purely psychic, neither natural nor culturally given, I will turn to a different set of influential thinkers, namely Paul and Augustine, to show how they foreshadow the promise of materiality in mystical texts by means of their varied understandings of a twofold embodiment.⁷

In yet another twist, Amy Hollywood’s essay Inside Out: Beatrice of Nazareth and Her Hagiographer (1994) acknowledged Beckwith’s important corrective to assimilations of women and bodiliness, while noting another problem: Beckwith’s primary source is a rule written for women by a male cleric, and assumes the compliance of the text’s female audience. For Hollywood, we cannot take male-authored texts as our primary source of information for women’s ‘relations to cultural representations and discourse,’ particularly when writings by women are available to us.⁸ The argument of this essay, which explores this tension in the writings by and about Beatrice of Nazareth, a contemporary of Hadewijch, would be echoed in The Soul as Virgin Wife: Mechthild of Magdeburg, Marguerite Porete, and Meister Eckhart (1995), when Hollywood complicated Bynum’s arguments by making critical distinctions between women’s writing and the writings of men about women, exposing the dangers threatening the historian who accepts the hagiographer’s account as if it were a piece of modern historical writing, shaped by concerns and conceptions of reality identical to our own.⁹ In noting this difference between the ways bodily suffering is treated in the writings of women mystics and of their male hagiographers, Hollywood highlights an ambiguity, showing that male biographers tend to emphasize the body in the mode of the objective and the external, while the women delineate a more elusive body, one which, in the case of the thirteenth-century mystic Christina the Astonishing, is associated with a realm of feeling or sensation separable from the body itself, yet not fully identified with the soul.¹⁰ The premise assumed of women’s natural physicality could not be a defining attribute for women’s writing, nor could it be so clearly gendered—unless one associated it with a signifying process. Amy Hollywood brought back the question of gender in terms of a difference in women’s writings, a difference that seems to be of, but not entirely so, the body itself.

In his article Desire for the Past (1999), Nicholas Watson brought up yet another issue in reading mystical texts—male- or female-authored—that concerns me here. He highlights scholars’ tendencies to focus on the material informing the representations of mystical experience rather than the means of its representation, overlooking the mediated nature of textuality. In his reading of the thirteenth-century Life of Elizabeth of Spalbeek written by Philip of Clairvaux, Watson shows how acting out divinity and Christ’s passion diffuses the relation between the subject and his or her body. He notes: "Elizabeth can be a miraculum in this text only insofar as she is not an agent. While Philip knows he is watching a performance, it is God who is the real actor, inspiring a re-enactment of Christ’s Passion which ‘this virgyne […] figures and expounes […] in hir body’; what fascinates him, in this life that is ‘alle mirakill,’ is the fusion of sign and signified, text and exposition, body and word."¹¹ The body’s signifying capacity is attributed not to the intention or subjectivity of the performer, but to an agency ascribed to God, making for a more complicated articulation of agency, embodiment, textuality, and feminine identification, which I will develop at length throughout this book.

Throughout past scholarship on mysticism—discussion of much of which I have had to omit here—questionings of materiality, gender, signifying-means, and subjectivity (among other things) have given us reason to doubt these perspectives’ applicability to mystical texts, at least according to the ways in which these terms have been conceived, that is, in relation to immediacy and a determinate materiality. By looking at embodiment as it is conceived by Christian theological and exegetical traditions—as a twofold entity and a transformational process—I hope to show how the tradition itself obfuscates our contemporary understanding of these terms, linking body and letter together. Because of a linguistic and temporal interplay, understanding embodiment in mystical texts is necessarily tied to a poetics, thus inviting us to rethink the relation of embodiment to literature.

THE BODY AND LETTERS

The inclusion of women in histories of spirituality and theology has been greatly aided by Bernard McGinn’s masterful volumes on the history of Western Christian mysticism, yet despite this ever-growing recognition of the diverse, complex, and informed nature of the use of the body in women’s mystical writings, the assessment of the literary qualities of these texts still encounters an awkward impasse, bound as it is to associations with embodiment that fall short of the literary.¹² In Mechthild of Magdeburg and Her Book (2004), Sara Poor points out that anthologies or groupings of women’s mystical texts oft en fail to look at the literary specificities of such works. Instead, they engage broad and contingent categories as unifying principles (such as gender, the body, experience, or a first-person narrative) and risk falling into the trap of essentializing these writings as exempla of women and their work in a way that places them in opposition to a literary tradition itself complicit with an unwitting marginalization of women’s writings.

As Poor notes, the most salient features that emerge from these writings—and seem to serve an umbrella function for categorizing women’s mystical texts—tend to be the emphasis on the body, the pervasive immediacy articulated throughout the texts, and a first- or third-person narrative. Yet these attributes correspond with women’s experiences, and not the literary qualities of the text. As a result, Poor notes, women writers are assumed to be purveyors of the feminine. Hence while men write literature, women write women’s experience.¹³ Poor concludes that the feminist challenge to these texts involves examining why and how women’s texts have been excluded from (and included in) the canon, rethinking the tradition that marginalizes them, and reconsidering the ways in which such traditions are formed conceptually and intellectually. Simply including female authors and supplementing a canon that defines itself according to the same long-standing criteria replicates the schism that has succeeded in differentiating them from canonical texts.

Analyses of individual mystical texts attempt in several ways to remedy the dilemma Poor has identified. One involves demonstrating how literary qualities that characterize specific women’s mystical texts are already in dialogue with literary traditions. Barbara Newman’s work on la mystique courtoise shows how, for example, Hadewijch’s songs use the Minnesang tradition to speak of the relation to the divine.¹⁴ Nicholas Watson also elaborates on the heterogeneity of Middle English mystical texts and the inextricability of vernacular theology from cultural, political, and literary currents, calling for a closer attention to the issues common to works thought of as mystical and works that are not in order to show the value of integrating mystics scholarship with the rest of literary history.¹⁵ The body is oft en invoked as an attempt to valorize the female body or flesh in the name of an authorial function or in the name of a femininity that subverts or counters male-oriented spiritual hierarchies.¹⁶ Yet David Aers has noted that this attempt to refer to the body is double-edged, as any focus on the body (especially in the name of the feminine) risks reemphasizing and reifying the patriarchal power that produces it if one does not explore the processes, performative acts, and powers in and through which [these powers] became fixed, normative, seemingly inevitable.¹⁷

In this book I define and elaborate on the relationship of embodiment to poetics and literary form, by showing their intertwined roles in medieval theology and practice. I engage with past scholarship on women’s mystical writings, arguing for a reconsideration of embodiment as it is understood in the larger Christian tradition, which, while in no way uniform, nevertheless articulates a doubleness of the body that is associated with spiritual transformation. I show that the body, invoked in this context, is not simply one biological entity, not a simple organic oneness, as Beckwith emphasized, but a manifestation of inner and outer persons as conceived of by Paul, Origen, and Augustine, among others. By understanding the mystic’s body as partaking in two bodies related to two persons—one inner and one outer—it becomes possible to relate the body to more than just a biological component. The inner person and inner body are understood as potential manifestations of Christ, the Word made flesh, and thus the inner person is linked to the Word, and eventually to textuality.

In following a series of associations involving inner and outer persons, I will show that the qualities that tend to alienate women’s mystical texts from the literary canon—their focuses on embodiment, immediacy, and experience—are crucial to our understanding of these texts, but must be understood as a form of textuality, as a literary mode in themselves. Bodily experience, as it is portrayed in mystical writings, is likened to a form of textuality and draws on a lengthy and well-established literary and theological history that associates the body with the word. In elaborating on this—predominantly through Hadewijch but also relating her to other mystics and theologians—I will show how embodiment and immediacy in women’s mysticism are critical for identifying a poetic and textual operation at work, one that has implications well beyond the category of this particular genre. When we are able to read embodiment, immediacy, and experience as responding to and performing various discursive and hermeneutic functions, another textual medium becomes perceptible, its language able to be heard and understood beyond merely being embodied. Understanding this embodied responsiveness as representing an affective or emotional literacy—that is, one that correlates affective responses with textual identifications—is a first step in discerning the larger textual role of the body, the long historical chain of associations that condition the body’s interpolation with textual forms.

Rather than seeking to isolate the body as an essentially feminine instrument for articulation in medieval mysticism, my concern here is to show how embodiment in Hadewijch and, by extension, in other mystical texts male and female, is conditioned by a Pauline and Augustinian theology that does not disavow the materiality of the body but aims to reconfigure it according to its inner counterpart and the orientation of the soul. In this sense, materiality is not fixed, but always in a process of becoming transformed. Materiality itself serves ends that do not negate it, but rather refer it to another process at work within. In attempting to make the outer person conform to its interior counterpart by performative and spiritual means, the outer becomes a truer reflection of the divine.

If we read women’s mysticism as privileging the flesh and subverting the Neoplatonic trend in mysticism that alienates the body from divine oneness (Philo), we perceive only a fraction of the larger picture. Many women’s mystical texts do indeed counter Neoplatonist tendencies, but they do so according to another strain in mysticism (which I identify in Paul and Augustine) that refashions the body as a spiritual vehicle, transforming its material substance into a means for becoming what one already is: the image of the human aspect of the divine. The outer body thus must be seen, read, interpreted, and experienced according to its inner counterpart. The formulation that posits flesh versus (Neoplatonic) spirit oft en misrecognizes the spiritual and literary work the outer body performs and runs the aforementioned risk of unwittingly associating women with a corporeality that separates them from the literary canon. With a few notable exceptions (such as Marguerite Porete, whose spiritual body is assimilated to textuality to an even greater degree), medieval women’s mysticism emphasizes embodiment as a means for accessing and expressing another form of literacy and exegesis, one that is not necessarily unorthodoxly subversive in and of itself, that is, in its use of embodiment, but rather, it is an orthodox means for other, at times subversive, ends.

At the same time that I emphasize the continuity between body and letter in female- and male-authored works and thus see a greater complexity at work in women’s mystical texts, I want to emphasize the singularity that announces itself in women’s mysticism at the level of a poetics. The Christian association of women with the body clearly played a significant role in how theological ideas were (and were not) communicated to women, and in how women were permitted access to scriptural exegesis. Women’s leaning on the incarnational qualities of language and experience reflects this in ways that do not reduce embodiment to merely being more bodily and experiential. The practice of the liturgy—of hymns, prayer, and sermons—links the truer sense of embodiment to textuality. While embodiment is always a theological issue insomuch as it relates to incarnation, it is also related to a performative element that yokes body and text together as reflections of one another. I choose to focus on women’s mystical writings not with the aim of showing an underlying essence associated with women or the body, but rather to highlight a difference of inflection in relation to embodiment that can enhance how we regard women’s mystical texts in their singular and collective specificities.

PAUL

To understand more fully this poetics of embodiment, it is crucial to recognize our own habits of thought about embodiment and the ways in which these are ill-matched with an influential patristic and medieval spiritual tradition that saw textuality as deeply and intricately embodied. As contemporary readers, we oft en privilege a uniform materiality and integrity with regard to the body and thus overlook the temporal and textual network in which the medieval body figures. When we refer to the body in conceptualizing the medieval mystic’s body, we habitually presume that the body constitutes one body, even if this designation finds theoretical nuance in terms of its designation as a natural or cultural body, gendered through performative or biological means. Even when the body is conceived of as a site of multiple kinds of constructions (gendered or other), it is thought of as contemporaneous with its spatiotemporal presentation in the world. No matter how porous, permeable, and fragile, the body is still conceived of as a single unit: one body, not more.

While this contemporary emphasis finds an uncanny historical resonance, for example, in texts like the thirteenth-century Roman de Silence—whose main protagonist’s feminine body is hidden in order to perform the function of a male heir and becomes a subject of debate between the characters Nature and Nurture—the body is still conceived of by us as well as by its author, Heldris of Cornwall, as a discrete entity that is a product of its contemporary environment (be it biological or cultural) and is not as multilayered or theologically invested as the mystic’s body.¹⁸ At the same time, studies that focus on material or phenomenal accounts of embodiment in mystics’ texts and attempt to locate a historical specificity in the feminine body tend to overlook its multifaceted nature without considering the complex distinctions of inner and outer that yoke it to any series of associations beyond gender itself. That is, in focusing on the materiality, or natural femininity, of the body, they tend to undervalue the textual, temporal, and religious significations of the body that coexist alongside its complex cultural, ritualized, and linguistic fabric.

What I will show here is that the body is more than just a single entity; rather, it is both a material and a spiritual body—conceptually tied to embodiments of inner and outer persons—that must be read according to multiple registers of meaning. In looking at embodiment and immediacy as intimately connected to a poetic and temporal framework, I recast what is oft en seen as an essentialized and natural part of experience in the light of an experience of reading the outer according to the inner. Understanding how reading and embodiment are fashioned together and become inextricable from one another allows us to see the ways in which language and the body mark each other as part of a temporal and poetic operation that is present in but not limited to women’s texts.

This interrelation between body and language is not a new phenomenon, nor is it unique to the Middle Ages; it is an essential element of Christianity, which identifies Christ with the Logos, the Word made flesh. The nature of the human being is intertwined with Christ in multiple ways, yet the most pertinent underlying link is through the figure of the Trinity and the imprint, or imago, that a person carries of divinity within. According to Trinitarian theology, divinity is coequal in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, and so one following the humanity of Christ participates in divinity in an equal fashion. Since humans are made in the image of the divine, they participate in divinity by means of the humanity of Christ, but only by means of finding, enacting, or activating the imago within and orienting the soul accordingly. This inner figure of the divine finds its basis in the division of the human being into inner and outer persons, the former serving as a means for reflecting the image of the divine. The outer person’s embodiment is not necessarily vilified or denigrated in order to be annulled and done away with for a higher intelligible realm; rather, the outer person becomes the locus for a revision of an individual’s substance. Women mystics will capitalize on this distinction in a way that allows the material body to become an ample vessel for spiritual ends. This distinction between inner and outer persons issues from a long Hellenic and Christian tradition; in Christianity, it associates the illumination of the human heart, or inner person, with the word of the Gospel: You yourself are our letter written in our hearts, known and read by all men (2 Cor 3:2).¹⁹ This written letter is destined to become a writing that manifests itself through the life or works of the outer body and is read like a text.

Hellenistic philosophy and literature, from Homer to Plato, oft en distinguished the body from the soul, which departed (and possibly perished once separated; see Phaedo 69e–70a) its physical vessel after death. Yet the soul was also referred to as that part of the human being that lived on eternally beyond death (oft en characterized as the psyche, psuche, or mind, nous), in contrast to the perishable part of human existence. Likewise, although not in identical fashion, the Christian tradition, especially the Pauline, connects the outer person with the perishing of the temporal body, and the inner with its eternal counterpart. In 2 Corinthians, Paul associates the outer person, or the exo anthropos, with mortal flesh (4:11), the soma, or body (4:10), and an earthly tent (5:1). Elsewhere the outer person is invoked in respect to human genealogical history (Gal 4:23 and 29) and the law of sin (Rom 7:23). The exo anthropos is thus associated with historical time—or, more specifically, with time itself—and the worldly medium in which the human is born, dwells, and perishes in time.

In contrast to the outer person, the inner person, or eso anthropos, is aligned with that dwelling not made by human hands which lives on eternally in the heavenly house: "For we know that if our earthly house of this tabernacle were dissolved, we have a building of God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. For in this we groan earnestly, desiring to be clothed [ependusasthai] with our house which is from heaven (2 Cor 5:1–2). The metaphor of clothing seen in Paul will be significant for Augustine, especially in relation to the holy interior clothing of [the] heart."²⁰ Likewise for Hadewijch, especially in her Liederen (songs), clothing oneself in Christ is a figure for the process of perfecting one’s person—outer and inner, both at once. The outer person is—as David Aune, Eric Jager, and philosophers such as Giorgio Agamben have argued—not part of a dualism, and neither is it entirely Platonic, for it is "not described as inherently evil or as in opposition to σω νθρωπος [o eso anthropos] though the outer person and the inner person are clearly in tension, for the latter is ‘sighing under a burden,’ i.e. desiring release from the drawbacks of physical existence."²¹ Rather, the outer body works in a dynamic tension—substantially and temporally—with the inner person.

By means of the inner, the outer finds a truer measure and means for becoming a spiritual vessel, renewing itself in the measure of the divine: Thus we do not wear out. Even though our outer person is being wasted away, our inner person is being renewed day by day (2 Cor 4:16). The inner person does not operate in the dominant rhythm of historical time but, rather, according to the immanent temporality and of law of the divine: "For I delight in the law of God according