Translating Christ in the Middle Ages: Gender, Authorship, and the Visionary Text

By Barbara Zimbalist

This study reveals how women’s visionary texts played a central role within medieval discourses of authorship, reading, and devotion.

From the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries, women across northern Europe began committing their visionary conversations with Christ to the written word. Translating Christ in this way required multiple transformations: divine speech into human language, aural event into textual artifact, visionary experience into linguistic record, and individual encounter into communal repetition. This ambitious study shows how women’s visionary texts form an underexamined literary tradition within medieval religious culture. Barbara Zimbalist demonstrates how, within this tradition, female visionaries developed new forms of authorship, reading, and devotion. Through these transformations, the female visionary authorized herself and her text, and performed a rhetorical imitatio Christi that offered models of interpretive practice and spoken devotion to her readers.

This literary-historical tradition has not yet been fully recognized on its own terms. By exploring its development in hagiography, visionary texts, and devotional literature, Zimbalist shows how this literary mode came to be not only possible but widespread and influential. She argues that women’s visionary translation reconfigured traditional hierarchies and positions of spiritual power for female authors and readers in ways that reverberated throughout late-medieval literary and religious cultures. In translating their visionary conversations with Christ into vernacular text, medieval women turned themselves into authors and devotional guides, and formed their readers into textual communities shaped by gendered visionary experiences and spoken imitatio Christi.

Comparing texts in Latin, Dutch, French, and English, Translating Christ in the Middle Ages explores how women’s visionary translation of Christ’s speech initiated larger transformations of gendered authorship and religious authority within medieval culture. The book will interest scholars in different linguistic and religious traditions in medieval studies, history, religious studies, and women’s and gender studies.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Release date: Feb 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9780268202217

Barbara Zimbalist

Barbara Zimbalist is associate professor of English at the University of Texas at El Paso.

Book preview

Translating Christ in the Middle Ages

TRANSLATING

CHRIST in the

MIDDLE AGES

Gender, Authorship, and the Visionary Text

BARBARA ZIMBALIST

University of Notre Dame Press

Notre Dame, Indiana

Copyright © 2022 by the University of Notre Dame

University of Notre Dame Press

Notre Dame, Indiana 46556

undpress.nd.edu

All Rights Reserved

Published in the United States of America

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021948755

ISBN: 978-0-268-20219-4 (Hardback)

ISBN: 978-0-268-20220-0 (Paperback)

ISBN: 978-0-268-20218-7 (WebPDF)

ISBN: 978-0-268-20221-7 (Epub)

This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at [e-mail]

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I owe heartfelt gratitude to many friends, teachers, colleagues, organizations, mentors, and family members who have supported me over the course of writing this book. I offer tremendous thanks to the many friends who read and discussed different chapters of this study with me over the years, especially Sara Petrosillo, Kristen Aldebol, Claire Dawkins, Andrew Kraebel, Laura Miles, Diana Denissen, Leah Schwebel, Steven Rozenski, Sara Ritchey, Racha Kirakosian, and Katie Buygis, and to my wonderful writing group, Suzanne Edwards, Tara Williams, Lynn Shutters, and especially my co-editor and writing partner Jessica Barr. Without the ideas, insights, and conversations they shared with me, this project would be much poorer.

I have also been rich in mentors throughout my academic life. I remember with love Laurel Amtower, my first advisor, every time I step into a classroom. Laurel and my other mentors at SDSU, Peter Herman and Joseph Smith, introduced me to graduate study and a professional world that has become home. I was encouraged at UC Davis by extraordinary faculty and especially benefitted from the guidance of Noah Guynn and Seeta Chaganti as I wrote my dissertation. Claire Waters, the most generous and gracious advisor one could ever hope for, remains an ongoing source of inspiration in academic life and far beyond. Other mentors have arrived to encourage and offer constructive critique at critical moments, and for their time, illuminating conversations, and generous advice, I am grateful to Cristina Cervone, Christine Cooper-Rompato, Patricia Dailey, Amy Hollywood, Cathy Mooney, Susan Morrison, Barbara Newman, and Nancy Bradley Warren. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Nicholas Watson, whose insights and support during the final stages of writing this book helped crystallize many of its central ideas.

Financial support from UC Davis, the Fulbright Program, and the Belgian American Educational Foundation allowed me to expand the dissertation that would become this book into truly comparative territory. My Belgian academic home, the University of Antwerp’s Ruusbroecgenootschap, introduced me to Elizabeth L’Estrange, Markus Polzer, Jonas van Mulder, and most importantly the inestimable Veerle Fraeters. Her deep knowledge of Hadewijch and insight into academic life and humane inquiry make her a true guide. At UTEP, I am grateful to department chairs Maggy Smith and Brian Yothers, who supported me throughout the process, and to Dean Steven Crites, who was instrumental in helping me arrange fellowship leave. Colleagues too were generous with their time, and I thank especially Matt Desing, Michelle Armstrong-Partida, and Sara Potter for much camaraderie, friendship, and editorial insight in those first few years of faculty life and the transition from dissertation to book manuscript.

My time as a Women’s Studies in Religion Research Associate at Harvard Divinity School allowed me a precious year to complete the book, and I am so grateful to Ann Braude, Catherine Brekus, and Tracy Wall, to my fellow research associates Damaris Parsitau, Anna Sun, Wylin Wilson, and Zahra Moballegh, and to my graduate students, who thought with me through questions of gendered authorship. The intellectual community of HDS and the WSRP was invaluable to the book’s final shape. I also thank the Center for the Study of World Religions at HDS, especially the director, Charles M. Stang, for offering an invigorating home during our year in Cambridge. To Adam McClain, graduate student and editorial assistant extraordinaire, I owe special thanks.

Finally, my family has seen me through the long writing process. To all of them, but especially to my beautiful children and wonderful husband Andy Fleck—my best reader, sharpest editor, and supportive partner—I offer my greatest thanks. You make everything possible.

Introduction

The Accomplished Word

So shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth: it shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it.

—Isaiah 55:11

In 1489, a nun named Jacomijne Costers wrote the Middle Dutch visionary text known as Visioen en Exampel.¹ Written in Antwerp following her brush with the plague, it describes her visionary journey through hell and purgatory. The Visioen’s vivid imagery accompanies long conversations between Jacomijne and Christ, during which he first points out her faults and then directs her future devotion. As her vision concludes, Christ’s instructions become increasingly detailed.

As a sign of peace between you and me, said the Lord, and because you are now purified, kiss now my loving feet. And he said then: O soul, you are now purified from all your sins. Desire henceforth to remain pure, and as a sign of thankfulness for all the graces that have been done you shall for one year honor my wounds with fifteen Pater Nosters and with fifteen prayers that have been ordained by my servant Birgitta. And as a sign that that is very pleasing to me, so shall you know everything by heart through my grace, and so shall you now more diligently read and continue to learn the Pater Noster that is your habit, because it is particularly pleasing to me.²

This late fifteenth-century passage dramatizes an interconnected set of literary and devotional features that, I argue, developed in stages within women’s visionary literature from the mid-thirteenth century in the Low Countries, France, and England. Visioen en Exampel provides a rich example of this tradition, as outlined in the following list. (1) The text depicts a woman receiving devotional instruction from Christ in a vision. (2) The female visionary hears this devotional guidance spoken directly by Christ and (3) describes that devotion as taking verbal form. Here, Christ recommends repeated performance of the Pater Noster and the pseudo-Birgittine Fifteen Oes. Further (4), the visionary narrator stands as a devotional model meant for readers to imitate while (5) locating the performance of her spoken devotion in the future beyond the text. At the same time (6), it positions itself within a gendered canon of visionary literacy, and finally (7), it authorizes speech and literacy as divinely approved devotional practices, in the vernacular, for female readers. Christ joins the ability to know everything by heart through my grace with diligent reading.

This striking scene of Christ speaking in the vernacular to a woman with instructions for a literary mode of piety might feel unexpected to modern readers. These very aspects of the text, however, would have been deeply familiar to late medieval readers of visionary literature. Medieval women had long participated as authors and readers in the tradition of visionary literature in a variety of ways that have received a great deal of critical attention.³ Yet one of the most consistent, central elements of this corpus remains largely neglected: Christ’s speech translated into text by a visionary woman. I use the term translation here in an unfamiliar way. I do not mean translation from one language to another. Instead, I turn to the Latin verbs transferre and (its derivative) translatere—to carry meaning across or over, from one context to another—an act that inevitably includes linguistic, contextual, even hermeneutic transformations.⁴ Throughout this book, visionary translation, a more complex operation than simply writing or transcribing, describes women’s transformation of Christ’s speech, received during individual visionary experience, into written text. When medieval women translated visions of Christ speaking into written text, they necessarily performed multiple transformations: of speech into text, of vision into language, and of divine utterance into human discourse. Through these transformations, the female visionary authorized herself and her text and performed a rhetorical imitatio Christi that offered readers a model of both interpretive practice and spoken devotion.

This book shows how texts such as Visioen en Exampel form an underexamined tradition of women’s visionary translation in late medieval culture. It demonstrates how, in this tradition, female visionaries from the twelfth through the fifteenth century developed new forms of authorship, reading, and devotion. This literary-historical tradition has not yet been fully recognized on its own terms. By exploring its development in hagiography, visionary text, and devotional literature, this book shows how this literary mode came to be not only possible, but widespread and influential. It argues that women’s visionary translation reconfigured traditional hierarchies and positions of spiritual power for female authors and readers in ways that reverberated throughout late medieval literary and religious cultures. In translating their visionary conversations with Christ into vernacular text, medieval women turned themselves into authors and devotional guides and formed their readers into textual communities shaped by gendered visionary experiences and spoken imitatio Christi.

Though prohibited from public speech, discouraged from Latinate learning, and barred from ecclesiastical authority, medieval women found a voice in religious culture by textually representing, imitating, and reimagining the central figure of spoken authority: Jesus Christ. Female visionaries engaged in rhetorical, spoken imitation of Christ as well as authorial activity, while their vernacular readers participated in a reading practice that functioned as interpretation (of Christ’s speech) and imitation (of both the visionary woman and Christ). In this way, female authors and readers participated in a textual community constituted by shared narrative experience. Women’s visionary texts thus challenged traditional prohibitions on female speech by reformulating both the authorial subjectivity of female visionaries and the devotional function of Christ’s speech in late medieval culture. Such visionary authorship occurred collaboratively and individually, in Latin and in the vernacular, and across genres. By comparing these different configurations of authors and texts, this book offers new answers to Barbara Newman’s famous query, What did it mean to say ‘I saw’?⁵ The literary representation of visions has received sustained critical attention.⁶ The specific ways in which women represented Christ’s speech, however, and the gendered uses of that representation have received far less comment. I argue that female visionaries created new verbal, rhetorical, authorial, and hermeneutic strategies in order to transmit Christ’s speech to vernacular readers. Moreover, I read these texts as significant gendered contributions to medieval visionary literature and religious culture.

As others have shown, over the course of the Middle Ages women increasingly took up visionary authorship as a way of authorizing their literary and spiritual endeavors.⁷ While medieval men certainly participated in visionary translation, their texts functioned differently because their authorial, narrative, and rhetorical imitatio did not create new modes of exemplary speech or devotion but rather functioned as acceptable literary versions of devotional practices already available to men in medieval society. Women’s visionary translations, on the other hand, created new modes of expression unavailable to them within medieval religious life. For these reasons, this study reads women’s visionary translations and their textual, rhetorical, and devotional effects as a distinct literary category for female authors and readers. As visionaries and authors, medieval women negotiated the gendered prohibitions of the antifeminist tradition.⁸ Forbidden by the Pauline model of community from public preaching and teaching (and thus from conventional positions of authority and power in medieval religious culture), women had long legitimized themselves through discursive modes that put into question either the public or the embodied aspects of their speech.⁹ Finally, Women’s speech and writing were seen as inseparably tied to gendered corporeality.¹⁰ This problem, as Marcia Colish and Alastair Minnis have explained, was understood as a problem of signification.¹¹ Since Christ had taken male human form, men were naturally able to imitate and signify Christ; women’s speech was seen as more fallible than that of men, ill suited for the expression of holy things that their gendered speech might corrupt. Yet the very fact that the textual record of the early church included prohibitions on women’s speech indicates the desire to control women’s speech and thus its presence and potential disruptive power.¹²

Historically, female visionaries attempted to deal with gendered prohibitions on speech through three distinct strategies. Some identified themselves as mere conduits or channels of holy speech.¹³ Such a narrative stance often backfired, however, when female visionaries had to demonstrate their lived holiness as justification for divine favor or defend their spiritual experiences as divinely inspired and not infernal through the increasingly codified (and complex) process of discretio spirituum.¹⁴ It safely cordoned off female speech from interaction with the divine communication it transmits and, by extension, from the acquisition of social or religious power. Others located the origins of their speech in nonphysical mystical encounters, visions, or dreams. As Patricia Dailey has shown, this strategy simply deferred embodied associations to the context of reading, as the text must eventually be translated into the language of lived embodiments, and thus remained circumscribed by gendered subjectivity.¹⁵ Moreover, this occlusion of gendered voice renders the process of translation invisible, when in fact the female visionary or mystic actively participated in the construction of the divine message.¹⁶ Finally, others foregrounded their textual, authorial identities rather than their corporeal identities.¹⁷ For all the legitimacy that inhered in the written record, however, women’s texts remained associated with female speech and language and inevitably provoked at best uncertainty and at worst censure.¹⁸ Each of these narrative strategies attempted to avoid the problem of gendered speech by disclaiming agency for their own speech, by locating the subject matter and inspiration for their prophecies or prophetic teaching beyond or outside of the body, or by replacing the gendered author with the asexual text. By attempting to sidestep the problem of gender, however, these strategies ultimately remain circumscribed by the gendered epistemologies and prohibitions to which they respond.¹⁹

I argue, however, that visionary translators whose texts claimed to provide readers with the ongoing, expansive record of Christ’s speech moved beyond these three models of self-authorization and textual legitimization precisely because they insisted, more or less overtly, upon the participation of their own gendered voices in the narrative construction of Christ. This process became increasingly apparent in the later Middle Ages, as more female visionaries began to occupy authoritative spiritual positions in both life and text.²⁰ Moreover, women’s literary participation in the Word of God resulted in narrative configurations that exceeded contemporary generic categories, devotional paradigms, and expectations of vernacular authority.²¹ The very literary and social conditions that created an environment of restricted learning and a lack of educational and intellectual opportunity for women paradoxically enabled the development of new literary modes and narrative positions of remarkable permissiveness for female authors and ultimately resulted in the increasingly common voice of Christ as a rhetorical trope and devotional practice.

As I argue in Translating Christ, women’s visionary authorship facilitated larger generic transformations. Increased representation of Christ’s visionary speech transformed hagiography and visionary literature into devotional texts. Such generic transformations, in turn, effected an expansion of the potential reading audience and relocated women’s visionary experience, narrative modes of imitatio Christi, and verbally based devotion from the margins of religious literary culture to its center. The literary-historical tradition this book explores spanned medieval Europe, and no single study could attend to all of its many culturally and linguistically distinct instantiations. I therefore focus on the origins and development of visionary translation in the high medieval Low Countries and France, and on its transmission and reception in the late medieval Low Countries and England, as particularly significant instances of a larger tradition. Before turning to these specific contexts, however, this introduction charts in more detail the development of visionary translation as a literary-devotional mode, explains how the rhetorical and generic construction of Christ’s speech within that mode emerges from the intersections of existing narrative and generic traditions, and demonstrates how the cultural parameters of gender, power, and authority coalesce and change within the tradition of women’s visionary authorship.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF A LITERARY AND DEVOTIONAL MODE

Over the course of the high and late Middle Ages, women’s conversations with Christ emerged as a literary mode and devotional practice. The origins of this literary mode, as I discuss in chapters 1 and 2, can be found in high medieval hagiography that emphasized contemporary women’s visionary conversations with Christ. Found initially in Latin vitae from the northern Low Countries and then in vernacular lives from the southern Low Countries and France, these texts featured the holy woman’s oral account of visionary conversation with Christ as an integral part of the hagiographic narrative, providing evidence of her sanctity and functioning as a model of exemplary devotional speech. In their emphasis on women’s visionary conversations with Christ, these early hagiographies establish several interconnected narrative features as fundamental to the devotional tradition they inspired: women’s exemplary speech, women’s oral narrative, and women’s authorial activity. First, in their representation of contemporary women’s visionary conversations with Christ, high medieval hagiographies established contemporary women as spiritually privileged, divinely approved exemplary speakers, and their vitae and lives thus encourage an understanding of women’s speech as devotionally powerful. As I show, this view of women as exemplary speakers complements high medieval women’s more familiar engagement in affective and ascetic modes of devotion. Second, the textual instantiation of the holy woman’s narrative of her visionary conversation—through either oral or written means—established her as an author, over and above her position as hagiographic subject. Third and finally, in these texts, hagiographic authorship thus functioned as a type of literary collaboration in which women participated—a new and different view of the well-known corpus of high medieval vitae as authored by men about women.²²

Eventually, these visionary hagiographies influenced the emergence of vernacular texts focused more extensively on women’s visionary conversations and encounters with Christ. Emerging first in the Middle Dutch texts of Hadewijch during the thirteenth century, the earliest vernacular visionary texts shared the hagiographies’ focus on women’s exemplary speech and narrative activity. Once women’s visionary conversations with Christ transcended the generic boundaries of hagiography, however, the textual and representational possibilities of women’s exemplary speech and narrative participation expanded as well. Perhaps most significantly, women began individually authoring their own visionary narratives and in doing so inhabited new positions of textual and spiritual authority. In subsequent centuries, this type of visionary translation emerged as an increasingly visible literary mode on its own terms. The later chapters of Translating Christ demonstrate how visionary translation functions as both authorial practice and devotional mode and continues, as in its early hagiographic form, to position the female visionary as a devotional model. As a fully fledged literary mode, moreover, visionary translation enabled these women to authorize themselves and their texts as providers of devotional instruction. That devotional instruction remained grounded in its origins as exemplary speech, eventually functioning as a kind of verbal imitatio Christi. Once again, this overtly spoken mode—of narrative and of devotional response—allowed visionary translators to appropriate spiritually authoritative positions. Moreover, by depicting their conversations with Christ as spiritually productive exchanges that readers might imitate, visionary translators instructed contemporary and future audiences in devotional habits that created new textual communities, often along distinctly gendered lines.²³

In creating a textual record of Christ speaking to them, visionary translation prioritized women’s visionary experience, authorship and reading, and speech as central features of their devotional life. These features set visionary translation apart as a literary-devotional tradition with unique narrative characteristics, specific audiences, and a distinct history. This body of texts incorporated different rhetorical and narrative features from other contemporary genres into the representation of Christ’s visionary speech and by the later Middle Ages did so in increasingly practical fashion directed to vernacular, often female audiences. While during the high Middle Ages visionary translation found only limited and local circulation within hagiography and its subgenres, by the later Middle Ages it had emerged as a distinct mode—if not a genre—frequently recopied for generations and explicitly recommended to its readers as devotional guidance and instruction. Throughout its development as a literary-devotional tradition, visionary translation exhibited several interrelated textual features: a focus on women’s visionary experiences, specifically, their conversations with Christ; an author’s transformation of that speech and dialogue into text and the corresponding participation of the visionary woman in that narrative transformation; and the presentation of the visionary woman as an exemplary speaker, often in ways that encouraged readerly imitation of both Christ and the visionary through rhetoric, reading, and interpretation. The rest of this section explains how, through the intersection of these characteristics, visionary translation created new positions of spiritual and textual authority for female authors and their readers.

Female visionaries experienced a variety of encounters with Christ. A single visionary experience might include multiple modes of perception, and an individual might experience different types of vision at different points in her spiritual career. Many of these women speak and write about seeing Christ as well as speaking with him. Others describe feelings, sensations, smells, sounds, and voices as Christ’s speech. Visionary experience was not always visual, as Christine Cooper-Rompato observes.²⁴ Moreover, entirely auditory communication with the divine occurred frequently in mystical visions despite the terminological associations of visual imagery.²⁵ This variety of perception reveals an understanding of visionary experience among women—and in particular the visionary experience of Christ—as diverse and sensorially varied. For this reason, conventional sensory terminology creates difficulty for analyzing visionary texts; one recent attempt to create new language for the diversity of visionary experience, for example, borrows from modern psychology to describe Margery Kempe’s multi-sensory or multi-modal visions as fused visions, a term adapted from the fused hallucinations of modern clinical discourse.²⁶ Regardless of sensory mode, however, the process of transforming Christ’s modally disparate visionary communication into text demands textual, linguistic, and interpretive work of the visionary narrator—what I call in this book the visionary translator. This narrative work took a wide range of literary forms, but the most important precedent for this interpretive process remained the medieval discourse of translation itself.

In the Middle Ages, the representation of Christ’s speech within human language was always already an act of translation. For medieval Christian thinkers, human speech and language were fundamentally translations of truths, concepts, and realities whose origins lay beyond any system of human signification. As Marcia Colish explains, Language, redeemed through the Incarnation, was both a necessary and an inadequate means to the knowledge of God.²⁷ Christ occupied a central role in this epistemology. As the Word made flesh, he mediated between humanity and divinity and, scripturally, transmitted God’s message of love to humanity. In transforming Christ’s speech into text, visionary translation emphasizes the common feature of visionary literature and translation: their difference and distance from, yet similarity to, their object of representation. Like visionary texts, translation remains distanced from its source, which it imitates and interprets but never exactly mirrors; medieval theories of translatio studii et imperii emphasized this distance.²⁸ Moreover, medieval translation—like all translation—did not simply replace a source text (often Latin) with a different language (often vernacular). Rather, the concept of translatio functioned metaphorically to signal the broader transformations of ideas and ideologies effected by linguistic translation.²⁹ The translated text represents multiple transfers of meaning—the transformation of multiple figurative meanings and interpretations over and above the translation of literal meaning—just as the visionary text represents the transfer of multiple modes of perception and interpretations of visionary experience into literature. Ultimately, the translator, like the visionary narrator, engages in authorial activity that mediates, interprets, explicates, and expands the text.

Visionary authors drew on the discourse and narrative techniques of translation to create new positions of rhetorical authority and exemplarity. First, visionary authors share in what Rita Copeland terms the impulse to yield and receive a formative influence, or the willingness to be changed, that characterizes medieval translation.³⁰ For visionary translators, this becomes a willingness to inhabit and subsequently to be altered by the epistemological and rhetorical positions of exemplar and instructor affiliated with Christ. At the same time, the understanding of translation as a constructive, interpretive process suggests how the visionary participates in the narrative and textual construction of Christ’s speech. The practice of making a text more accessible to readers through linguistic translation that incorporated interpretation, exegesis, and commentary remained the norm throughout the Middle Ages.³¹ Medieval translators often commented on the scope of their narrative and authorial roles, acknowledging their contributions to the translated text in ways that revealed an understanding of themselves as participants in the creation of meaning and content—a process Andrew Kraebel terms commentary-translation.³² The visionary author and the medieval translator thus shared a similarly constructive narrative role that could range from direct reportage to interpretation to invention. When the subject of translation was Christ’s speech, that role gained new authority.

The visionary authors examined here similarly appropriated textual authority through a narrative and rhetorical imitatio Christi that functioned as authorial activity and devotional model. Initially, visionary translation established female visionaries as exemplary speakers. Eventually it became a narrative mode that invited response from readers, first through reading and interpretation, then through spoken imitation of the visionary narrator, and finally—perhaps—by engaging in their own conversations with Christ. Traditionally, imitatio Christi maintained the primary position of the imitated (Christ), while the imitators conformed themselves more closely to the divine ideal.³³ Scholarly attention to women’s participation in the imitatio Christi tradition has often focused on the externally affective modes of corporeal asceticism through which women physically imitated Christ’s suffering, traced most famously by Caroline Walker Bynum, and the internally affective mode of image-based and emotionally charged contemplation in which women intensely imagined and identified with Christ’s suffering, as discussed by Sarah McNamer.³⁴ Visionary translation created a new and different way for female authors and audiences to inhabit a Christological subjectivity that complements these more well known, corporeally inflected modes of devotion. The rhetorical construction of women’s visionary texts that recounted conversation with Christ allowed authors as well as readers to model themselves on Christ’s spoken identity and thus inhabit Christ’s position of verbal authority.³⁵ Through rhetorical imitatio, the female visionary translator simultaneously authorized her own visionary experience and participated in the construction of the visionary text for a vernacular audience.

In addition to inhabiting new authoritative positions in imitation of Christ, the visionary translator becomes an exemplary speaker in her own right. Her narrative and authorial participation allows her to imitate Christ’s rhetorical identity as an exemplary speaker and devotional model. This construction of exemplarity draws on two important narrative features of hagiography to create a chain of imitation between Christ, visionary author, and vernacular reader. First, all hagiography ultimately descends from one ideal narrative template: the life of Christ.³⁶ All saints model themselves on Christ, though of course no saint could ever perfectly imitate him. Second, through their imitatio, all saints became exemplary, in turn inspiring admiration and inviting imitation, the former affirming their exceptional, inimitable holiness, the latter modeling new forms of devotional response.³⁷ Particularly in the hagiographies discussed in chapters 1, 2, and 3, the female visionary imitates Christ’s human, evangelical identity by relaying, interpreting, and even shaping his visionary message for readers; however, she never imitates his divine identity, nor does she herself ever entirely create the divine message. Eventually, her speech in imitation of or in obedience to Christ’s visionary instructions becomes exemplary and imitable, while her visionary identity remains evidence of her exceptional sanctity. The narrative configurations of this exemplarity shifted, as I show in chapters 3, 4, and 5, when women began authoring individual visionary texts in the vernacular. As female visionaries began to write devotionally instructive texts, their imitative narrative became increasingly interpretive and creative, and their own exemplary speaking positions began to appropriate positions of spiritual and literary authority associated with Christ and the clergy. In all cases, however, the visionary author’s divinely authorized transformation of Christ’s speech into text becomes an imitatio of Christ’s mediating identity as the Word made flesh, evoking both wonder and emulation.

Ultimately, this rhetorical exemplarity creates a chain of imitation as devotional practice for readers, who might imitate the visionary’s rhetorical, verbal response to Christ as interpretive performance. The visionary texts examined in chapters 4 and 5, in particular, invite rhetorical imitation from readers by verbal means.³⁸ Vernacular readers imitate the visionary narrator’s interpretive practice and then her speech as they first read the text of Christ’s visionary conversation and then, potentially, repeat the visionary woman’s responses as a mode of devotional practice. Such participation, as Heather Blatt has observed, not only offers a discourse and procedures to shape relations between writers, readers, and texts, but also becomes a framework used by writers to explore the developing authority of themselves and their texts.³⁹ Within women’s visionary texts, such participatory reading practice took distinctive rhetorical shape.⁴⁰ One famous example occurs in Julian of Norwich’s Revelation of Love. In a passage from the twelfth revelation, which I discuss more fully in chapter 4, Christ repeatedly proclaims, I it am, in an increasingly abstract series of self-definitions. In response, all readers must actively supply the personalized, definitional term in order to correctly interpret his speech. Devotional writers’ expectation that readers will participate in similar ways appears repeatedly in late medieval English literature, as Eleanor Johnson has recently shown.⁴¹ As this book demonstrates, however, Julian’s Middle English Revelation emerges from the longer tradition of women’s visionary translation that had developed over the two previous centuries on the Continent. That tradition repeatedly locates gendered participation in Christ’s speech through the types of interpretive practice and spoken imitation described here and thus reveals women’s participation in the ongoing, vernacular Word of God.

Finally, within women’s visionary translation, the temporal dimensions of Christ’s speech repeatedly direct devotional response forward, beyond the scene of reading into future devotional speech. In her work on women’s mystical and visionary texts, Patricia Dailey observes that texts eliciting devotional performance promise to find unity and wholeness in a future tense, inaccessible at present—accessible only in a time yet to come, made palpable by the promise of the text.⁴² Dailey reminds us that these texts’ narrative temporality both reveals and creates a textual community united by future hermeneutic engagement. Similarly, James Simpson has described this temporal quality—what he terms an anagogic sensibility characteristic of religious literature in late medieval England—as a spiritual impulse that enmeshes readers in the imagined future community that is envisioned by the text and then left to readers to enact.⁴³ I argue that this participatory quality, which sets these texts apart as a distinct category of gendered literary experience, originates in twelfth- and thirteenth-century hagiography from the Low Countries—far earlier than the insular examples discussed by Johnson and Simpson. Moreover, since (as Minnis has shown) such vernacular hermeneutics often emerge in response to a perceived cultural lack, we can read visionary translation as one of many responses to the lack of readily imitable devotional models for female authors and readers.⁴⁴ In her recent work, Alison More reminds us that throughout the Middle Ages, public devotional practices for women remained extremely limited across Europe.⁴⁵ Understood in this context, visionary translation appears as a gendered literary tradition defined not by language, region, or time but by the hermeneutic engagement and spoken imitation of both authors and readers. These texts invited readers to participate individually in responding to their accounts of Christ’s speech and to join into community with other readers as a result of doing so. By enabling this devotional and literary activity in addition to authoring their texts, visionary translators further reconfigured positions of discursive and spiritual agency.

Throughout this book, then, I use the phrase visionary translation to describe both the action of the visionary author and the visionary text itself. First, visionary translation describes the act of transformation performed by the woman who narrates Christ’s words as received in a vision. Second, visionary translation describes any text that claims to record Christ’s visionary speech—of various experiential types—in written language. The visionary imitates Christ through the process of translating her vision into narrative that others can read, which in turn prompts the reader to engage with the text in imitation of the narrator. This chain of imitation blurs the verbal boundary between Christ and visionary, narrator and reader, and, ultimately, the reader and Christ. Women’s visionary texts invited readers into a new mode of devotional reading and, as a result, a new conceptual model for the relationship of the reader and the Word of God. Understanding this rhetorical relationship reveals how these texts function separately for authors and readers. By offering their narrators’ translation of Christ’s speech as a model of rhetorical imitatio Christi for the community, they simultaneously authorize the visionary narrator and invite devotional activity from readers. That community was always in excess of the text, understood to create speech projected into—and performed within—the future, beyond the moment of reading. Ultimately, that future devotional performance created a gendered textual community and literary tradition.

SCHOLARLY CONTEXT: NARRATIVE AND GENERIC TRADITIONS

Women’s visionary texts developed into a new literary mode by incorporating narrative features of other genres and traditions. In the formulation of narrator and audience, for example, visionary translation draws on the hagiography and mysticism from the high Middle Ages. Studies of mysticism, indebted to the magisterial work of Bernard McGinn, have demonstrated the careful construction of implied audience in texts that recount multiple, increasingly complex visions over time as a pedagogical strategy.⁴⁶ Though they borrow this narrative feature, women’s visionary texts ultimately are not simply a subset of mysticism, because they are not always or entirely concerned with working toward or representing mystical union with God. Likewise, much work in hagiography analyzes the narrative construction of female exemplarity.⁴⁷ Yet visionary texts, again, are ultimately not hagiography, because they are concerned with specific visionary instances rather than the entire lifetimes of holy subjects. Women’s visionary literature thus draws on particular generic features from both of these traditions, even as it shapes those borrowed features into new narrative patterns and arrangements. In what follows, I show that in keeping with the typical generic plurality of popular medieval religious texts, women’s visionary texts borrow from many forms.⁴⁸ In addition to mysticism and hagiography, they drew from a wide range of genres in order to represent Christ’s speech. These include the narrative tradition of visionary literature more broadly, the declamatory quotation of sermons, the expansive impulse toward representing divine speech in the capacious canon of late medieval biblical literature, and the contemplative, imaginative, and improvisational quotation of Christ in devotional literature.⁴⁹ All of these genres can depict women’s visionary experience, represent Christ’s speech, and elicit specific responses from their readers, but only visionary translation consistently combines these three elements. Yet while its generic plurality resulted in formal flexibility and innovation, visionary translation now tends to be read as derivative rather than as innovative, variously identified and discussed as hagiography, mysticism, or devotional literature rather than as a distinct genre in its own right. I argue that visionary translation draws on the rhetorical techniques developed by these and other genres to represent Christ’s speech in the vernacular. In employing these generic features, visionary translation offers readers new points of access to the Word beyond the scriptural record.⁵⁰

Medieval discussion about visionary literature descended from Augustine of Hippo’s typology of visions in his Literal Commentary on Genesis, which remained influential throughout the Middle Ages. Writing of Paul’s visionary account of the third heaven, a vision that he may or may not have seen with bodily eyes, Augustine articulates a taxonomy of visionary types. He writes:

Let us call the first kind of vision corporeal, because it is perceived through the body and presented to the senses of the body. The second will be spiritual, for whatever is not a body, and yet is something, is rightly called spirit; and certainly the image of an absent body,