Women's Lives: Self-Representation, Reception and Appropriation in the Middle Ages

Women’s Lives presents essays on the ways in which the lives and voices of women permeated medieval literature and culture. The ubiquity of women amongst the medieval canon provides an opportunity for considering a different sphere of medieval culture and power that is frequently not given the attention it requires. The reception and use of female figures from this period has proven influential as subjects in literary, political, and social writings; the lives of medieval women may be read as models of positive transgression, and their representation and reception make powerful arguments for equality, agency and authority on behalf of the writers who employed them. The volume includes essays on well-known medieval women, such as Hildegard of Bingen and Teresa of Cartagena, as well as women less-known to scholars of the European Middle Ages, such as Al-Kāhina and Liang Hongyu. Each essay is directly related to the work of Elizabeth Petroff, a scholar of Medieval Women Mystics who helped recover texts written by medieval women.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Release date: Feb 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9781786838353

Book preview

RELIGION AND CULTURE IN THE MIDDLE AGES

Women’s Lives

Series Editors

Denis Renevey (Université de Lausanne)

Diane Watt (University of Surrey)

Editorial Board

Miri Rubin (Queen Mary University of London)

Jean- Claude Schmitt (École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris)

Fiona Somerset (Duke University)

Christiania Whitehead (University of Warwick)

RELIGION AND CULTURE IN THE MIDDLE AGES

Women’s Lives

Self-Representation, Reception and Appropriation in the Middle Ages

Essays in Honour of Elizabeth Petroff

edited by

NAHIR I. OTAÑO GRACIA AND DANIEL ARMENTI

© The Contributors, 2022

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any material form (including photocopying or storing it in any medium by electronic means and whether or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of this publication) without the written permission of the copyright owner except in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act. Applications for the copyright owner’s written permission to reproduce any part of this publication should be addressed to the University of Wales Press, University Registry, King Edward VII Avenue, Cardiff, CF10 3NS.

www.uwp.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978-1-78683-833-9

eISBN 978-1-78683-835-3

The right of the Contributors to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 79 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

CONTENTS

Series Editors’ Preface

List of Illustrations

Notes on Contributors

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Nahir I. Otaño Gracia and Daniel Armenti

IELIZABETH PETROFF AND MYSTICISM

1Women and Mysticism in the Medieval World

Elizabeth Alvilda Petroff

2Male Confessors and Female Penitents: Possibilities for Dialogue

Elizabeth Alvilda Petroff

II SELF-REPRESENTATION

3The Empowerment of Teresa de Cartagena through Her Patroness

Juana de Mendoza Borja de Cossío

4Hildegardian Remixes: Hildegard von Bingen and the Appropriation of Auctoritas

Andrés Amitai Wilson

5Language and Trance Theatre

Rebeca Sanmartín Bastida

III RECEPTION

6Smuggled Balsam and the Inscription of Memory: Hugeberc von Hildesheim and the Pilgrimage of Saint Willibald

Susan Signe Morrison

7Gender, Genre and Collaboration in the Life of Ida of Nivelles

Barbara Zimbalist

8History Meets Literary Imagination: The Making of a Twelfth-Century Woman Warrior

Lan Dong

9A Woman Mystic in Pre-Islamic North Africa: Al Kāhina in the Futūḥ Miṣr

Denise K. Filios

IV APPROPRIATION

10 When Romance and Hagiography Meet: Inventing Saintly Women in The South English Legendary

Meriem Pagès

11 Selfless Acts of Salvation as Self-Glorification: Saving the Prostitute in Hrotsvith’s Plays

Madalina Meirosu

12 Liturgy and the Performance of the Mystical Self

Claire Taylor Jones

SERIES EDITORS’ PREFACE

Religion and Culture in the Middle Ages aims to explore the interface between medieval religion and culture, with as broad an understanding of those terms as possible. It puts to the forefront studies which engage with works that significantly contributed to the shaping of medieval culture. However, it also gives attention to studies dealing with works that reflect and highlight aspects of medieval culture that have been neglected in the past by scholars of the medieval disciplines. For example, devotional works and the practice they infer illuminate our understanding of the medieval subject and its culture in remarkable ways, while studies of the material space designed and inhabited by medieval subjects yield new evidence on the period and the people who shaped it and lived in it. In the larger field of religion and culture, we also want to explore further the roles played by women as authors, readers and owners of books, thereby defining them more precisely as actors in the cultural field. The series as a whole investigates the European Middle Ages, from c.500 to c.1500. Our aim is to explore medieval religion and culture with the tools belonging to such disciplines as, among others, art history, philosophy, theology, history, musicology, the history of medicine and literature. In particular, we would like to promote interdisciplinary studies, as we believe strongly that our modern understanding of the term applies fascinatingly well to a cultural period marked by a less tight confinement and categorization of its disciplines than the modern period. However, our only criterion is academic excellence, with the belief that the use of a large diversity of critical tools and theoretical approaches enables a deeper understanding of medieval culture. We want the series to reflect this diversity, as we believe that, as a collection of outstanding contributions, it offers a more subtle representation of a period that is marked by paradoxes and contradictions and which necessarily reflects diversity and difference, however difficult it may sometimes have proved for medieval culture to accept these notions.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

1Wu Youru’s (fl. nineteenth century) drawing that portrays the battle scene in which Lady Liang beats the drum on a ship. From Wu Youru, Wu Youru Huabao (Shanghai: Biyuan huishe, c .1909), no. pag.

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Daniel Armenti is a Visiting Lecturer in Italian at the College of the Holy Cross. His research focuses on the reception of classical literature during the Middle Ages and on how literary representations of sexual and gendered violence contributed to the institutionalisation of rape culture in the Middle Ages. His current project explores the expression of traumatic experience and the challenges that arise in writing and voicing traumatic events.

Borja de Cossío is a Professor of Practice at Tulane University. He received a BA in English Philology and an MA in Comparative Literature from the Universidad de Oviedo, and another MA and a Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, with a specialisation in Medieval and Golden Age Literature. His main areas of expertise include early modern visionaries before Saint Teresa, the adaptation of the Spanish Baroque in early seventeenth-century English poetry, and the digital humanities. Among his publications is a digital edition of El libro de la oración de Sor María de Santo Domingo for the Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies, and he has also published three different digital editions for Catálogo de Santas Vivas at the Universidad Complutense in Madrid: eighteenth-century hagiographies on Sor María de Santo Domingo and her sister María de la Asunción, and forty-three lives of women taken from Crónica de la Santa Provincia de Granada (1683). He is currently working on another edition of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz written by her confessor, Diego de Calleja in 1693. He has also published work on Teresa de Cartagena, Sor María de Santo Domingo and Richard Crashaw. Before coming to Tulane, he taught at UMass Amherst and Colorado College.

Lan Dong is Interim Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and the Louise Hartman Schewe and Karl Schewe Professor in Liberal Arts and Sciences (2017–20) at the University of Illinois Springfield. She teaches Asian American literature, world literature, comics and graphic narratives, and children’s and young adult literature. She has published six books as either author or editor and has published numerous journal articles, book chapters and reference essays on Asian American literature, comics and graphic narratives, and children’s and young adult literature.

Denise K. Filios is an Associate Professor in the in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Iowa. She is the author of Performing Women in the Middle Ages: Sex, Gender, and the Iberian Lyric. Her teaching and research interests include medieval Spanish literature, women in literature and performance, and North African–Spanish cultural contacts from 711 to the present. Her current book project examines stories about the conquest of Iberia in early Islamic and Hispano-Latin historiography.

Claire Taylor Jones is Associate Professor of German at the University of Notre Dame. Her publications include the monograph Ruling the Spirit: Women, Liturgy, and Dominican Reform in Late Medieval Germany (Penn Press, 2018) and the book-length translation Women’s History in the Age of Reformation: Johannes Meyer’s Chronicle of the Dominican Observance (PIMS, 2019).

Madalina Meirosu specialises in comparative approaches to nineteenth-century political and social thought in German literature. She also has expertise in contemporary migration literature, the Medical Humanities, and Women and Gender Studies. Her current research project explores the political undertones of nineteenth-century literature featuring artificial humanoids.

Susan Signe Morrison, Texas State University System Regents’ Professor and University Distinguished Professor of English at Texas State University, specialises in comparative medieval literature, gender and cultural studies, and ecocriticism. She has written on topics ranging from women pilgrims in the Middle Ages and Geoffrey Chaucer’s use of excrement to waste as material and metaphoric agent in our world; her award-winning book, A Medieval Woman’s Companion: Women’s Lives in the European Middle Ages, has been translated into German. Creative works express her commitment to making women’s lives – all too often neglected historically – present to the reader as vibrant agents of change. Her novel, Grendel’s Mother: The Saga of the Wyrd-Wife, tells the tale of the Old English epic poem Beowulf from the perspective of the female characters.

Nahir I. Otaño Gracia is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of New Mexico, and a member at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) at Princeton. Her theoretical frameworks include critical identity studies, translation theory and practice, and the global North Atlantic – extending the North Atlantic to include the Iberian Peninsula and Africa. She has published several articles on literatures written in Middle English, Old Castilian, Old Catalan, Old Irish and Old Norse-Icelandic, and they have appeared in journals such as Comitatus, Enarratio, Literature Compass and English Language Notes. Her current projects include a monograph entitled The Other Faces of Arthur: Medieval Arthurian Texts from the Global North Atlantic.

Meriem Pagès is Professor in the English Department at Keene State College, where she teaches a range of courses on medieval literature. She is the author of From Martyr to Murderer: Representations of the Assassins in Twelfth- and Thirteenth-Century Europe (Syracuse University Press, 2014). She has also edited The Middle Ages on Television: Critical Essays with Karolyn Kinane (McFarland, 2015) and, with Robert G. Sullivan, Imagining the Self, Constructing the Past: Selected Proceedings from the 36th Annual Medieval and Renaissance Forum (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2016) and Art and Violence in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2020). Her essay ‘Navigating Gender in the Mediterranean: Exploring Hybrid Identities in Aucassin et Nicolete’ appeared in the volume Gender in the Premodern Mediterranean (ACMRS Press, 2019). She currently serves as the Director of the Medieval and Renaissance Forum and the Coordinator of the Center for Creative Inquiry at Keene State College.

Rebeca Sanmartín Bastida is a Full Professor at the Universidad Complutense, Madrid. She has worked for several years at the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (Madrid, 1996–2004) and at the University of Manchester (UK, 2001–3). Her research encompasses different periods, although she favours especially the fifteenth, sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. In recent years, she has published widely on Spanish visionary women, including editions of María de Santo Domingo’s Revelaciones (with María Luengo Balbás; PMHRS, 2014) and her Libro de la Oración (with María Victoria Curto Hernández; Iberoamericana, 2019), and the monographs La representación de las místicas: Sor María de Santo Domingo en su contexto europeo (Real Sociedad Menéndez Pelayo, 2012) and La comida visionaria: Formas de alimentación en el discurso carismático femenino del siglo xvi (CCCP, 2015). She is currently directing a research project on this subject: Catalogue of Living Saints (1400–1550): Towards a Complete Corpus of a Female Hagiographic Model, funded by the Spanish Government.

Andrés Amitai Wilson currently serves on the English faculty at the Roxbury Latin School in Boston, where he teaches English, music, and yoga. He has published poetry, short stories and articles on a variety of medieval and modernist topics. He is also a busy session and touring guitarist with many recordings and performance credits, in genres from hip-hop to jazz and everything in between. Andrés holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and has also earned degrees from Columbia University and the Berklee College of Music. When not making music, reading or writing, he can usually be found running around in the woods with his three children or recklessly riding his bicycle in circles.

Barbara Zimbalist is Associate Professor of Medieval Literature at the University of Texas-El Paso. She has been a Fulbright Scholar and Visiting Assistant Professor at Harvard Divinity School, and her first book, Translating Christ in the Middle Ages: Gender, Authorship, and the Visionary Text, is forthcoming from the University of Notre Dame Press.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The process of putting together this volume was lengthy and daunting, and we owe a great deal of thanks to everyone who helped us along the way. First and foremost is our professor and mentor, Elizabeth Alvilda Petroff, for whom this volume was initially conceived. As with many of the contributors to this volume, who were also guided through their studies by Elizabeth before her retirement in 2014, we are grateful for the care and attention she gave to us, her students, over the years. In us she instilled more than an awareness of the diversity of voices present in medieval literature, but of the need for continual investigation of those voices. It is our honour to present a volume celebrating her academic work. We would also like to thank all of our contributors, whose wonderful essays make this volume a valuable addition to scholarship on the writing of medieval women mystics; without their continued enthusiasm – not to mention patience – this volume could not have been completed.

Many others are owed thanks for the final version of this volume: Sarah Lewis, the Head of Commissioning at the University of Wales Press has been indispensable in her support of this project, as well as her help in putting the volume together. Likewise, we would like to extend our thanks to the Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Department, and especially to the Program in Comparative Literature, at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, for their financial contributions against the costs of this volume, not to mention their academic support for us during our studies. In particular we would like to thank Leslie Hiller, the Business Manager for the Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Department, who single-handedly resolved financial issues for us when we would have been hopelessly lost. Each of us has individuals we would like to thank for their support and advice along the way. Daniel would like to thank Simona Wright and Roberta Ricci for their practical advice in navigating the process of managing an edited volume. Likewise, thanks to Marisol Barbón, Jessica Barr, Michael Papio and Teresa Ramsby – you were all very patient with me as I balanced the work of this volume against that of my dissertation. I could not ask for better mentors. Finally, thanks to Elif, always, for her support and love. Nahir would like to thank the medievalist communities at the Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton, the University of New Mexico, the University of Pennsylvania and the Medievalists of Color group for their encouragement and support. Special thanks must go to Geraldine Heng, Seeta Chaganti, Rita Copeland, Kevin Brownlee and Suzanne Akbari for their generous support. Nahir would also like to thank her husband and children – Matt, Violet, and Enora – ustedes son mi luz y mi camino y yo los amo con todo mi corazón.

Elizabeth Petroff’s contributions to this volume were first published in her book, Body and Soul: Essays on Medieval Women and Mysticism (Oxford University Press, 1994), and they appear with permission from Oxford University Press. We would like to finish as we began, by thanking Elizabeth Petroff: thank you for your generosity, and we hope we have made you proud.

Nahir I. Otaño Gracia

Daniel Armenti

2021

Introduction

NAHIR I. OTAÑO GRACIA AND DANIEL ARMENTI

It cannot have been more than a few weeks after Elizabeth Petroff’s retirement in 2014 that we discussed the idea of putting together a volume of scholarship in honour of her career. At that point in our own studies, both of us were at pivotal moments in our academic careers – Daniel had just passed his exams to become a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Massachusetts and Nahir was about to begin a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania – and we wanted to curate a collection of essays that represented the impact that Elizabeth’s presence had in our lives and in our work as well as on the field of medieval studies. Our first step was to organise two panels at the Fiftieth International Congress on Medieval Studies at Kalamazoo in 2015, ‘New Theoretical Approaches to Medieval Women Writers’ and ‘Writing Medieval Women Mystics’, from which we were able to draw a core of contributors. From there we sought out the other excellent contributions that would complement the goals of this volume.

As our mentor and advisor, Elizabeth Petroff was always ready with thoughtful, honest advice to help us navigate academia, everyday life and, of course, medieval literature and culture. She was adamant that we find our voices as academics, but also to know how, when and where to use them. She felt that to survive, she often had to hide her voice: as a woman in academia, she frequently encountered gender bias and dismissal of her work. She once told Nahir, in a conversation about raciolinguistic bias, that she had to learn to think and write like a man if she wanted academia to take her seriously. Petroff was sorry to hear that decades later Nahir was being asked to do the same, because of racial and gender bias. Petroff did not want us to have to hide ourselves to survive. Today, we want to honour her voice and honour the many ways she helped our own voices grow as academics. The essays in this volume aim to celebrate her legacy by bringing together the work of accomplished scholars, many her colleagues, former students and admirers, to underscore the ways in which the lives and voices of women permeated medieval literature and culture. These essays are directly related to the work of Elizabeth Petroff as an influential scholar of medieval women mystics, whose research helped recover texts written by medieval women that often reflect a marginalised experience and opened medieval scholarship to new generations. The present volume focuses on texts written by or about women and includes essays that centre around women, mostly mystics, from Asia, North Africa and Europe; they are a testament to the openness of Professor Petroff’s scholarship and the type of work that she inspires.

Petroff’s scholarly corpus belongs to a movement that rescued the voices of women writers. Medieval Women’s Visionary Literature (1986), edited by Petroff, translates many primary sources into English, giving access to a body of medieval literature written by women who were certain that they were chosen, by God or by some other Power, and that their voices were meant to be used to speak. The volume continues to be an invaluable text from which to teach medieval women writers to this day. Petroff’s theoretical framework for editing Medieval Women’s Visionary Literature, the defiant act of proving the heteronormative, patriarchal model of scholarship insufficient and lacking, has become more important than ever before, at a time when the urgency of recognising and listening to women’s voices has been brought to the forefront of political discourse.

Some of the most influential work in the field of Medieval Studies functions in this way, recovering the historical realities of the Middle Ages by dismantling the patriarchal, colonial systems that have shaped our understanding of the Middle Ages as a ‘pre-racial, pre-political era in which Europe was homogeneously Caucasian and an unproblematized Christianity reigned supreme’.¹ Petroff’s recovery work of the Middle Ages, which demonstrates that the male-dominated medieval canon was curated to benefit white men, provides a methodology for scholarship of this sort. For both of us, Petroff’s tenacity in uncovering a different past from the one ‘sold’ in Medieval Studies has been key for our own research, respectively on the role of literature in the construction of rape culture, and on how Arthuriana from the Global North Atlantic demonstrates ideologies of exclusion against Muslims and Africans, as well as in our past collaborative work.² Petroff’s desire to bring voice to marginalised women was a first step to help us focus on bringing to the fore the voices of other marginalised communities.

Despite the fact that Medieval Women’s Visionary Literature has given us a theoretical framework that is necessary to uncover our Medieval past – a framework that has helped redefine the field of Medieval Studies – it is her monograph, Body and Soul: Essays on Medieval Women and Mysticism (1994), that most influenced this present volume. Her insights that there is a ‘radical difference between the way male biographers view saintly women and women’s view of themselves’, and that female-authored medieval mystical texts ‘are radically noncanonical’, as well as her insights into women’s embodiment, mysticism and agency, have acted as a foundation for the collected essays that we present here.³ In fact, her approach, which was radical at the moment of her writing, shows that critical identity studies have always been key to understanding the Middle Ages. Petroff suggests that

Mystical texts by women will not fit into a traditional Western notion of literature, because they derive from a different relationship to language. I see these texts as a window onto a lost world of experience of thousands of women from late antiquity until just before the Renaissance, an experience that is recuperable by us only if we radically challenge prevailing ideas of what constitutes literature and what is the nature of reality.⁴

Petroff’s argument questions heteronormative ideologies about the Middle Ages by disrupting the meaning of the concepts ‘Western literature’, ‘language’ and ‘reality’ itself. In this way, she helps to deconstruct the Middle Ages and the ideology that white, patriarchal, colonial research is the only way to understand the Middle Ages instead of being a biased representation of the Middle Ages. It seems to us that medieval scholarship has finally caught up to Elizabeth Petroff.

The introduction of theoretical outlets such as post-colonial theory, Mediterranean studies, global medieval studies, and more recently critical race studies, disability studies and queer studies, has challenged previous academic ideologies on the Middle Ages and has changed the course of medieval studies for the better. Petroff’s work has helped this shift. From research on disability studies, breastfeeding and wet-nursing, and the queer Middle Ages, Petroff is quoted, often alongside Caroline Walker Bynum, on the importance of embodiment in the Middle Ages.⁵ Tison Pugh, for example, quoting Petroff, writes: ‘As Elizabeth Alvilda Petroff demonstrates, bodies and gender are inextricably connected to visionary writing: Bodies – the visionary’s own body and the body of Christ – are very important in women’s visionary writings […] [I]n using the language of the body the medieval writer may be able to say unsayable or unthinkable things.’⁶ Petroff’s work has also been instrumental in the study of women and religion. From works on Hindu and Christian theologies of emotion to the interconnections between sexuality and mysticism, Petroff’s work on illuminating the embodied aspects of the spirituality of Christian women continues to be influential and to move medieval research forward.⁷

Petroff’s framework, which has helped to redefine the medieval canon, has had real-world implications for her students, many of whom are featured as authors in this volume. In fact, this wide-ranging study of women, the inclusion of non-‘Western’ medieval subjects, and the opening up of our conceptions of what the term ‘medieval’ encompasses are a testament to Petroff’s passion to help women and minority individuals to study medieval literature and culture. In a field in which less than one per cent of scholars are people of colour, and in which scholars tend to cloister within national languages, religious studies and around gender lines, this volume breaks with these traditional aspects of the field. In the public essay ‘Lost in Our Field: Racism and the International Congress on Medieval Studies’, Nahir Otaño Gracia talks about the racism she has encountered at the ICMS congress and how she was able to overcome that first shock. She writes:

I remember recounting my experience to one of my professors and wondering out loud if I was meant to be a medievalist. It seemed to me that the attendees at ICMS were not convinced that I should. My professor gave me the best answer for me at that moment. ‘Fuck them and do what you want, you don’t owe them anything.’⁸

That professor, the one that had the right words at the right time, was Elizabeth Petroff. In other words, Petroff was the type of mentor that lived by her own ideologies, allowing us, her students, to challenge prevailing ideas on the Middle Ages, creating a new generation of medievalists that, we hope and fervently believe, will continue to recuperate medieval experiences and challenge normative notions about the Middle Ages. This is what set Petroff apart in her commitment to scholarship and her commitment to teaching.

This volume honours Petroff’s legacy by focusing on themes of mysticism and spirituality as they connect historically and literarily to women’s experiences, highlighting the often marginalised experience that is integral to an understanding of medieval spirituality in general. These themes were integral to her research and teaching agenda, and we hope to continue and expand the work she helped open in medieval studies. Our first section, ‘Petroff and Mysticism’, returns to two of Petroff’s ground-breaking essays, originally published as chapters in Body and Soul. ‘Women and Mysticism in the Medieval World’ serves as an introduction to mysticism and women mystics, centring on several concepts for the study of female mysticism; ‘Male Confessors and Female Penitents: Possibilities for Dialogue’ explores the relationship between women mystics and their confessors. Petroff emphasises themes that reverberate throughout this volume: how the mystical experience allowed female subjects to contend with the many restrictions placed upon them; the embodiment of that experience in the female life cycle, in many cases transcending social class and geography; and the access to freedom granted to women mystics that allowed them to discover their individual voices. These themes continue to reverberate today, in part, because they are about celebrating and self-affirming the experiences of women. Petroff’s work does not only show how heteronormative patriarchy confined women to specific roles or created violence against women; she also recuperates the voices of women and highlights how they still thrived despite oppression.

Petroff’s first essay provides language to analyse and study an experience that is understood to be ‘beyond language’ even as women mystics used language to write down their experiences. Petroff grounds medieval women mystics within the context of mysticism, the Middle Ages and their place in their societies, identifying that many

medieval women’s mysticism was primarily visual and affective; that is, the mystic saw and felt truth, saw God or Christ or the saints, and was flooded with love for what she saw. So powerful was this love that she felt compelled to share it with others, and so effective was the transformation created in her by her mystical experiences that she discovered and invented new ways to communicate her insights.

Beyond this broad outline of women mystics and mysticism, Petroff introduces eight important women mystics – Christina of Markyate, Hildegard of Bingen, Hadewijch of Antwerp, Mechthild of Magdeburg, Marguerite Porete, Angela of Foligno, Catherine of Siena and Julian of Norwich – that ‘left autobiographical and didactic writings’ that ‘were bilingual and bicultural’, and whose ‘lives and life-styles… illustrate the various possibilities open to women with spiritual vocations… and the variety of paths to the divine that may be termed mystical and visionary’. Finally, ‘Women and Mysticism’ points out that the European High Middle Ages was not just steeped in faith, ‘but it was also an age of crisis. In such a context, mysticism was not a retreat from the negative aspects of reality but a creative marshalling of energy in order to transform reality and the perception of it.’ It is this creative energy to transform reality and the perception of reality that this edited collection honours through this publication.

In Petroff’s second essay, ‘Male Confessors and Female Penitents: Possibilities for Dialogue’, she emphasises the extraordinary power of the female voice through the audacity of her three subjects – Christina of Markyate, Marie d’Oignies and Margery Kempe – in their drive to express their experiences to their confessors. Petroff highlights that by analysing the relationship between penitent and confessor, we can see ‘that visionary authority indeed provided women with a voice and the content for teaching’. Petroff concludes that these relationships underline the compelling nature of women’s voices and their deliberate rejection of the stereotypes of womanhood that bound medieval women. These deliberate rejections of stereotypical roles for medieval women were ultimately what allowed growth for women and the men around them.

‘Male Confessors and Female Penitents’ continues to provide scholars with frameworks to describe the relationships of power between male confessors and women mystics, a relationship that is analysed further in the essays by Rebeca Sanmartín Bastida and Barbara Zimbalist. Petroff’s reading of the relationship between Christina of Markyate and the Norman abbot Geoffrey of St Albans, for instance, exemplifies the ways in which Petroff’s work continues to be necessary, but it also reveals the limitations of her work and the necessity to recognise and pursue new areas of inquiry that arise in medieval studies. Petroff analyses Christina’s and Geoffrey’s relationship through a feminist perspective: she explains that Christina comes from a prominent early English family that was able to maintain their position after the Norman conquest, and she points out that

Geoffrey came from a different world, the world of the overlords of England. He was Norman and, according to one reader of the Christina manuscript, acted just like a Norman (‘more Normanorum’ says the marginal note), meaning he behaved arrogantly and thought himself superior.

Although Petroff is aware of the manifold power imbalances of this relationship, she is not able to successfully account for the fact that Christina is a member of the newly subjugated English community, and the abbot is part of the new French-speaking ruling class.⁹ Emerging scholarship on the topic of structural bias and power imbalances, such as that of Tarren Andrews, shows the ways that the Normans used settler-colonial ideologies to acquire land and remain in power.¹⁰ We believe that revisiting the relationship between Christina and Geoffrey through an intersectional perspective that considers the myriad forms of power imbalance will garner new important research. Petroff’s interdisciplinary work has already helped produce important research in medieval queer, religious and feminist studies, and we welcome the opportunity for our readers to use Petroff as an inspiration to produce exciting new work, in part by revisiting Christina and Geoffrey’s relationship, but also through the essays published in this volume.

Beyond Petroff’s essays, we have collected the contributions to this volume into three further sections: ‘Self-Representation’, ‘Reception’ and ‘Appropriation’. These three areas reflect the chasm between women writers and the male-centric approach favoured in the Middle Ages and its reverberations in our present society. The areas also present a more thorough look at the lives of medieval women and account for our relationship with them as scholars and readers. Additionally, these three areas allow us to showcase the ways in which Petroff’s research had a profound effect across multiple disciplines.

‘Self-Representation’ gives emphasis to women writers, considering the ways in which their texts both expose and hinder them. In other words, the research in this section focuses on women writers and their relationship with their own writing. This section begins with two studies that consider women mystics not as unique cases within a medieval literary canon but as fundamentally integral to their respective literary traditions: ‘The Empowerment of Teresa de Cartagena’ by Borja de Cossío and ‘Hildergardian Remixes: Hildegard von Bingen and the Appropriation of Auctoritas’ by Andrés Amitai Wilson. De Cossío analyses shifts within the works of Teresa de Cartagena, a formative Spanish woman writer from the fifteenth century and understudied to this day. De Cossío astutely demonstrates the changes in language, tone and topic between her Arboleda de los enfermos (The Grove of the Infirm) and Admiraçion operum Dey (Wonder at the Works of God), which turn Teresa’s voice from that of a woman who is ‘resigned’ to accept her deafness as mandate from God, to the strong voice of a woman who is able to legitimise her position as a writer in a fifteenth-century Spanish context. Wilson, by contrast, discusses one of the best-known women writers of the Middle Ages, Hildegard von Bingen (1098–1179), and highlights her use of auctoritas to insert herself into the canon. Wilson pays close attention to her use of music to appropriate and modify common prophetic and biblical tropes, which she utilised deftly to construct authority for herself and learned medieval women in general.

We close the section with Rebeca Sanmartín Bastida and her analysis of female performance and mysticism. Her essay, ‘Language and Trance Theatre’, is a translation and adaptation of a section from her book on Sor Maria de Santo Domingo (2012),¹¹ in which she discusses the relationship among European female mystics with the men, women and the communities that surrounded them, as well as the literary performances that accompanied their writing. This essay bridges the gap between this section and the next by exploring how European women writers legitimised and protected themselves through their performances and how their communities tended to appropriate their voices, demonstrating the complicated patterns of writing, authority and performance that surrounded women mystics and their texts.

The next section, ‘Reception’, centres on how medieval women have been represented through time, demonstrating the importance of women within a historical context. Exploring how medieval historical women are represented continues the important work of exposing the role of women in history, which tends to be devalued in our current male-centric, patriarchal status quo. Moreover, this section focuses on the relationship of women mystics, both as authors and characters, to their readers. It demonstrates the function these historical women played in their respective societies. ‘Reception’, begins with Susan Signe Morrison’s ‘Smuggled Balsam and the Inscription of Memory: Hugeberc von Hildesheim and the Pilgrimage of Saint Willibald’. Her essay analyses Hugeberc of Hildesheim’s retelling of Willibald’s pilgrimage to the Holy Land (eighth century) in which a holy woman uses her own authority to grant authority to a male subject. Morrison demonstrates that the retelling of Willibald’s pilgrimage manipulates gender expectations in the act of reading, turning that act into a pilgrimage unto itself. The section continues with ‘Gender, Genre and Collaboration in the Life of Ida of Nivelles’ by Barbara Zimbalist. Her essay demonstrates the collaborative aspects of the Life of Ida by focusing on the female, visionary, vernacular and oral aspects of the text instead of prioritising the male, clerical, Latinate and textual aspects. By decentring the male perspective, she shows that the text is a product of the relationship between Ida, her hagiographer and the community members that witnessed and reported her visions before and after her death. While Morrison studies the reception of the text by the reader, who is immersed in the experience of pilgrimage, Zimbalist explores the reception of Ida’s work within her own community and the ways that Ida’s life and reception helped to form her Vita.

Lan Dong and Denise K. Filios move the section towards the reception of female historical figures within a larger geographic frame. Both works centre on historical military women, Liang Hongyu and Al-Kāhina, and the ways their lives became legends in China and North Africa respectively. ‘History Meets Legend: The Making of a Twelfth-Century Woman Warrior’ by Lan Dong demonstrates how writings about Liang Hongyu transform her into a symbol of loyalty, wisdom and courage by highlighting two particular aspects of her mystification: the presentation and reception of her body as an object of reverence and the overwhelming emphasis on her virtues which outshone her transgression of participating in combat, a male dominated space. ‘A Woman Mystic in Pre-Islamic North Africa: Al Kāhina in the Futūḥ Miṣr’ by Denise K. Filios studies the mysticism of this Berber Queen, military hero and icon of Amazigh identity as depicted in Ibn ‘Abd al-Ḥakam’s Futūḥ Miṣr [The Conquest of Egypt]. Al-Kāhina’s mystical experiences are corroborated by Ibn ‘Abd al-Ḥakam’s citations of her speech which allow the readers to reconstruct the complex social, political and religious needs served by her historical persona.

Finally, ‘Appropriation’ explores how women’s lives tend to be usurped within medieval literature written by both men and women, and what these acts of appropriation reveal about women in the Middle Ages. This final section also broadens the term ‘appropriation’ to include the appropriation of medieval women in general, not just women writers, through current theories and themes, in order to understand medieval women better from our modern perspective and as scholars/teachers of medieval women writers.

The section begins with Meriem Pagès’s ‘When Romance and Hagiography Meet: Inventing Saintly Women in The South English Legendary’, which explores the addition of Saint Thomas à Becket’s saintly mother in the thirteenth-century South English Legendary. Romance influences the hagiography by the inclusion of a well-known stock motif, that of the Saracen princess who betrays faith and kin for her Christian lover. Pagès’s analysis raises the question of why England’s most ‘English’ saint needed a foreign, converted mother to help him fulfil his divine mission, as well as the consequences of this relationship on the construction of English identity in the late Middle Ages. ‘Selfless Acts of Salvation as Self-Glorification: Saving the Prostitute in Hrotsvith’s Plays’ by Madalina Meirosu analyses Hrotsvitha of Gandersheim’s plays and anonymous medieval accounts of the lives of Thais (Paphnutius) and Mary (Abraham), pointing out that these stories of female redemption focus on the virgin saviour rather than on the penitent, promiscuous sinner. The motif of the redemption of the prostitute becomes a vehicle for gaining glory by converting prostitutes. While Pagès demonstrates the appropriation of romance in hagiography, Meirosu critiques the appropriation of the body of prostitutes in order to glorify virginity.

We close the book with ‘Liturgy and the Performance of the Mystical Self’ by Claire Taylor Jones. Jones’s insightful essay moves the study of medieval women writers in new directions by questioning the supposition that the women who have been worthy of study are those that are exceptions to the medieval patriarchal tradition because they construct female agency through resistance to a patriarchal order. Jones’s analysis of the monastic practice of liturgy, for example, answers why a medieval woman might have chosen the rigid life of monastic practice, not merely as flight or retreat from the male-dominated world, but in active pursuit of a certain form of subjectivity. She reassesses medieval women’s agency as a performative, bodily textuality that is linked to the daily practice of the liturgy. Jones leads her reader to understand the process of appropriation of women mystics in our modern world and shows that modern scholars tend to focus on women that overtly reject patriarchy, a type of appropriation that elides the ways that ‘everyday’ women might have also rejected patriarchy.

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We offer these essays in honour of Elizabeth Avilda Petroff, a great scholar, teacher and friend. We regard the research presented in this volume as an extension of her legacy and impact on the field of medieval mystical writing and the relevance of women’s voices from the Middle Ages. We are proud to be a part of that legacy, and it is with excitement that we join our voices with hers to present these new studies on those subjects.

Works Cited

Andrews, Tarren, ‘Colonial Entanglements: The Domesday Book, the Dawes Act, and Indigenous Temporal Sovereignty’, in Jane Hawkes, Megan Henvey and Amanda Doviak (eds), Transmissions and Translations in Medieval Literary and Material Culture (Leiden: Brill, forthcoming).

Andrews, Tarren and Tiffany Beechy (eds), English Language Notes: Indigenous Futures & Medieval Pasts, special issue 58/2 (2020).

Armenti, Daniel, ‘Moralizing the rape of Philomela in late medieval commentary’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of Massachusetts Amherst, 2020).

Bynum, Caroline Walker, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone Books, 1991).

Bynum, Caroline Walker, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987).

Heng, Geraldine, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018).

Heng, Geraldine, ‘Who Speaks for Us? Race, Medievalists, and the Middle Ages’, Medievalists of Color (3 April 2018), www.medievalistsofcolor.com.

Kim, Dorothy (ed.), Literature Compass: Critical Race and the Middle Ages, special issue 16/9–10 (2019), doi.org/10.1111/lic3.12545.

Miyashiro, Adam, ‘Our Deeper Past: Race, Settler Colonialism, and Medieval Heritage Politics’, Literature Compass: Critical Race and the Middle Ages, special issue edited by Dorothy Kim, 16/9–10 (2019), doi.org/10.1111/lic3.12545.

Moran, Lia and Jacob Gilad, ‘From Folklore to Scientific Evidence: Breast-Feeding and Wet-Nursing in Islam and the Case of Non-Puerperal Lactation’, International Journal