The Mystical Presence of Christ: The Exceptional and the Ordinary in Late Medieval Religion

By Richard Kieckhefer

The Mystical Presence of Christ investigates the connections between exceptional experiences of Christ's presence and ordinary devotion to Christ in the late medieval West. Unsettling the notion that experiences of seeing Christ's figure or hearing Christ speak are simply exceptional events that happen at singular moments, Richard Kieckhefer reveals the entanglements between these experiences and those that occur through the imagery, language, and rituals of ordinary, everyday devotional culture.

Kieckhefer begins his book by reconsidering the "who" and the "how" of Christ's mystical presence. He argues that Christ's humanity and divinity were equally important preconditions for encounters, both exceptional and ordinary, which Kieckhefer proposes as existing on a spectrum of experience that moves from presupposition to intuition and finally to perception. Kieckhefer then examines various contexts of Christ manifestations—during prayer, meditation, and liturgy, for example—with attention to gender dynamics and the relationship between saintly individuals and their hagiographers. Through penetrating discussions of a diverse set of texts and figures across the long fourteenth century (Angela of Foligno, the nuns of Helfta, Margery Kempe, Dorothea of Montau, Meister Eckhart, Henry Suso, and Walter Hilton, among others), Kieckhefer shows that seemingly exceptional manifestations of Christ were also embedded in ordinary religious experience.

Wide-ranging in scope and groundbreaking in methodology, The Mystical Presence of Christ is a magisterial work that rethinks the interplay between the exceptional and the ordinary in the workings of late medieval religion.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Release date: Sep 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9781501765124

Richard Kieckhefer

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Book preview

Introduction

The Presence of Christ as Exceptional and Ordinary

When Anna Vorhtlin was chosen as prioress of Engelthal convent, we are told, Christ assured her he would be with her in all the cares her office would bring her. He would protect her from adversaries and bestow honor upon her. When the office nonetheless proved burdensome, she prayed, O Lord, you made me such fine promises, but now I am suffering so grievously! He replied that he had not abandoned her for one moment but had remained with her always. She then looked up and saw him before her. Taking three steps, he told her she must always walk in his footsteps. Common counsel in late medieval piety: imitation of Christ means following him in a life of affliction.¹

Among holy men and especially women of the late medieval West, few themes rival in significance the presence of Christ and communication from him. The story of Anna Vorhtlin, which comes from a compilation by Christina Ebner, is one of many. Christ’s frequent presence is a dominant theme—arguably the main theme—in the substantially autobiographical book of Margery Kempe, the hagiographic lives that Raymond of Capua and Johannes Marienwerder wrote about Catherine of Siena and Dorothea of Montau, the revelations that Mechthild of Hackeborn and Gertrude of Helfta told to confidantes, the life of Veronica of Binasco written by a later hagiographer on the basis of notes by contemporaries, and other texts, regardless of differences in genre and context.

If the presence of Christ was centrally important to these exceptional figures, it was equally central to the devotional lives of more ordinary individuals. The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries witnessed an explosion of devotional texts, art, and practices, and much of this devotional culture was Christocentric and meant to create a lively sense not only of Christ’s historical life but of his presence to the devout person in prayer.² For every individual who saw visions of Christ or heard his voice, there were many others who prayed to him assuming he was really and literally (if not physically) present. Meditations on the life of Christ, stations of the cross, veneration of the sacred face of Christ, the rosary, statues of the Virgin and Child or the Pietà, might lead the reader or practitioner to imaginative projection backward in time but could equally produce a sense of the infant Christ or the Man of Sorrows as a living presence here and now.³ New feast days celebrated the name of Jesus along with other devotional foci.⁴ Christ present in the eucharistic host was increasingly an object of devotional adoration, exhibited in a monstrance and used in rituals of benediction, and carried in procession on the feast of Corpus Christi. A late medieval book of prayers asks for a vision of Christ with the eyes of the heart before one’s death, assuming this experience could in principle be imparted to anyone.⁵ Devotions were supported by indulgences, which could be gained by going on a pilgrimage, saying a prayer, gazing at an image. If we are seeking historical context for the presence of Christ discussed in this book, it is to be found primarily in this burgeoning devotional culture.

If Christ’s presence was so vitally important both for exceptional and for ordinary religion, the question must be raised: What connections are there between the exceptional and the ordinary? That is the central question pursued in this book. The answer is not simple, because the links were various. Most basically, ordinary and exceptional piety enjoyed a symbiotic connection. Widely shared assumptions about Christ’s presence lent plausibility to more striking claims about perceiving that presence, while those exceptional claims reinforced the more wonted assumptions. Visions and locutions reinforced ordinary conviction, but ordinary conviction made visions and locutions possible in the first place. A prayer book that cultivated prayer before a crucifix and a story in which Christ spoke back from the crucifix represent two sides of the same Christocentric culture.⁶ If prayer practices helped cultivate awareness of Christ’s presence, it may have been not so much the more sophisticated meditations but ordinary prayer formulas and even recitation of sacred names that had such effect. The life of a saintly woman such as Dorothea of Montau may interweave notions of rarefied mystical experience (voiced perhaps by the hagiographer more than the subject) with accounts of hearing Christ insistently in the context of everyday life (probably revealing more fully the subject’s perspective). Scholarly attention tends to be directed either toward the exceptional figures (the nuns of Helfta, Birgitta, Margery Kempe, and others) or toward the ordinary religion of parish churches and chapels, homes and cloisters, processional routes and pilgrimage shrines. But the exceptional and the ordinary were not rigidly detached from each other. Too often missed is the tangled interweaving of commonplace experience and extravagant event, habitual routine and sensational irruption. If we want to understand how late medieval religion worked at any level, exceptional or ordinary, we need to explore how ordinary and exceptional religion related to each other. That, then, is the main point of this book: the embeddedness of the exceptional within the ordinary.

Why should Christ’s insistent companionship be called his mystical presence? The theme is not usually associated with the canonical mystics of the late medieval West, Marguerite Porete or Meister Eckhart, The Cloud of Unknowing or Julian of Norwich, or others, most of whom have only supporting roles or cameo appearances in this book. It might seem better to speak of the spiritual presence of Christ. But to call it spiritual would emphasize its ordinariness, while calling it mystical suggests that it is exceptional. It was in fact both: ordinary as a matter of implicit faith but exceptional as a matter of explicit experience. The figures we are discussing crossed over the line and claimed to experience in an ongoing way a vivid realization of Christ’s manifest presence, which is referred to here as mystical.

The presence of Christ is, of course, not specifically a late medieval phenomenon. There is nothing more fundamental to Christianity than the conviction of Christ’s presence. One early Christian poet suggested that he is always present to receive in his body the pains of his saints, and he had done so already when the Holy Innocents were massacred, which implies that even during his historical life he could be spiritually present in such a way as to receive others’ bodily sufferings in his own body.⁷ In two lines of verse, this poet managed to weave together the historical and transhistorical presence of Christ, his spiritual and his physical presence, his infancy narrative and the suffering in his own body more often associated with his Passion. More typically the aspects of his presence are represented one at a time. At the end of Matthew’s gospel, Christ promised he would always be present among his disciples. For Matthew he might be present in the concrete individual in need, the hungry and thirsty calling for aid. For Paul in his epistles his presence might be embodied in the Church, in the Eucharist, in the bodily members of the baptized.⁸ Even to say that Christ is both divine and human is to make a claim about his presence; while creatures come and go, present in particular times and places, it is the nature of God to be present at all times and places. Christ is the only person seen as reliably present in both modes, and the Christ who as God is present everywhere is the same person who was present at a historical moment.⁹ A ghost may perhaps stumble across a divide between worlds, but that is unexpected. Christian theology and devotion take it as the special quality of Christ always to be present everywhere, the same person who was present in Capernaum or Emmaus. Having tasted human experience, having lived a life on earth, he has a story to recall and a personality that inheres in that person. The Jesus of history is not distinct from the transhistorical Christ. To say that Christ is risen is again to make a claim about his presence, to say that he is present to living individuals as alive: stories of his appearance (to Paul in particular) predate the gospel accounts of the empty tomb, and in at least three of the gospels the absence from the tomb is less prominent to the narrative than the presence to the disciples. That Christ has risen is less significant than that he is risen. The martyrs had visions of Christ when they were about to die.¹⁰ He stood by Saint Anthony in his temptation, but appeared only afterward. He came to Saint Martin and others incognito, as a beggar. He spoke to Saint Francis of Assisi and others from a crucifix.¹¹ Twelfth-century Cistercians insisted that the historical memory of Jesus might be delightful but the experience of his living presence was far more so.¹² When a friar visited an elderly woman, she knew that he had medical problems, but she said Jesus had spoken to her that morning and given assurance that his medical treatment would go well. Often these stories are difficult to locate in time and place, but this incident can be assigned with precision to the northwest side of Chicago, in 2009.¹³ Volumes have been written about people who report such experiences in recent times.¹⁴

Still, there are aspects of the theme that are especially characteristic of late medieval piety, if not unique to it. Between the late thirteenth and the early fifteenth centuries, hearing the voice of Christ and sometimes beholding him in visions were phenomena interwoven with the everyday lives of individuals and sometimes with the communal routines of women’s monasteries, particularly their liturgical routines. Saints’ vitae and other sources in the later medieval West sometimes represented contact with Christ as not just an occasional but a frequent experience. He might be a saint’s frequent visitor, ever in her company, as was said of Catherine of Siena.¹⁵ It is this pervasive presence—the interaction and communication with Christ that become so frequent that he seems almost a constant companion—that is here called the mystical presence of Christ. During the long fourteenth century, cases of such interweaving can be found especially in Germany but also in Italy, England, and elsewhere, in tandem with the Christocentric devotionalism prevalent at the time. Devotionalism brought religion into every corner of life, and the mystical presence of Christ was the experience of his presence in that same quotidian environment. While these tendencies lasted, they played a tremendously important role in religious culture.¹⁶

Already in the first half of the thirteenth century there were individuals such as the Flemish nun Lutgard of Aywières (1182–1246), who had a vision of Christ that dissuaded her from marriage, had another vision of Christ crucified, and experienced further encounters with Christ. Sometimes he gave her reassurance regarding the state of her soul, or her inattention to liturgy, or her death. She beheld the face of Christ and was united with him in contemplation. Her vita says, The presence of Christ renders every place, no matter how hateful, supremely delightful and remarkably desirable. When she died, the nuns of her convent knew that Jesus came with the saints to receive her. Often her contact with Christ came when she interceded on behalf of others.¹⁷ Her vita does not talk about integration of Christ’s presence with liturgical and quotidian experience, but it anticipates later cases in which that presence was even more fully experienced. Ida of Nivelles (ca. 1190–1231) also often conversed with Christ; he beckoned to her, his spirit was ever-familiar, and during mass she sensed his presence on the altar, but if he came to her as a child, they would engage in playful exchange.¹⁸ In both these cases, as in others, there is anticipation of tendencies that would become more fully and richly developed in the long fourteenth century.

Plan of This Book

If people claimed to experience the presence of Christ, it may be useful to begin by asking about the Christ they encountered. Much of the historical literature over the past two generations has assumed that late medieval devotion was chiefly to the humanity of Christ. Chapters 1 and 2 will show that this notion is problematic. The Christ whose presence is reported in the sources is very much a divine Christ. In the religious literature and in common parlance, Christ is almost ubiquitously referred to as God. He may be helpless in the manger and suffering on the cross, but in medieval sources it is usually clear—and often emphasized—that it is God in the manger and God on the cross.¹⁹ Christ on the cross says he wishes to show you that I, God, stop my ears in heaven.²⁰ Is there confusion here, or misunderstanding? No, what we find in the sources is standard, long-standing theology of Christ’s person and natures. For our late medieval sources, Christ’s divinity is not only a matter of faith but, as we shall see, a fundamentally important precondition for both ordinary and exceptional experience of his presence. Chapter 1 lays out the basic argument and its theological implications, while chapter 2 traces how these issues are dealt with in a range of later medieval texts. That traditional Christology can be seen in late medieval texts should not be surprising or controversial; that the divinity of Christ was important to late medieval writers is no great discovery. Nonetheless, the strong emphasis in the scholarly literature on the humanity of Christ tends to obscure why and how his divinity was crucially important. While chapters 1 and 2 jointly deal with these issues, chapter 2 also serves to introduce to the reader the texts and personalities that will recur throughout the book.

Chapter 3 then turns from the Christ who is revealed to the recipients of that revelation. Those who are said to have heard and seen Christ are easily seen as altogether special cases, whether their experience is seen as supernatural or as delusional. It may be useful to look at such reports in terms of a spectrum, a fluid transition running from presupposition of spiritual presence to intuition and then to perception of that presence. There is a sense (which will need to be discussed) in which presupposition of presence was nearly universal: those who recognized Christ as God at least notionally took it for granted that he was ubiquitous. The devout might intuit his presence. The exceptionally devout might claim to have heard or even seen him, and if they persuaded others that they had perceived that presence, this said something about them, possibly that they were saints. A simple and straightforward version of the argument might be that intuition was what really occurred and that statements of perception were inflated boasts or hagiographic topoi. Perhaps that was the case; it would be difficult to prove. What we can show is that the sources themselves at least sometimes recognize something very much like this fluid transition from presupposition to intuition to perception as a valid model for understanding experience of spiritual presence.

These first three chapters, dealing with the Christ whose presence is experienced and the ways that experience of Christ becomes represented, the who and the how of his manifestation, constitute the heart of the book. The following chapters present a series of corollaries to what is said there, or alternative perspectives on the main themes laid out in those chapters. Most importantly, subsequent chapters explore further ways in which the mystical presence of Christ is exceptional yet grounded in ordinary religious experience.

If we wish to understand the relationship between ordinary and exceptional piety, we must know something about the ways people prayed to Christ and the relationship between such prayer and experience of his presence. Prayers to Christ, meditations on his historical life, and scripted dialogues with him are all elements in the Christocentric devotion that contextualizes claims about his mystical presence. Chapter 4 surveys these forms of prayer and meditation but argues that it is simpler prayers, interjections, and even repetition of the name Jesus that are the strongest links between ordinary piety and exceptional experience. It is crucially important that those who reported hearing and even seeing Christ did not generally use rarefied forms of prayer distinctive to them, but used common and often very simple prayer formulas. The devotional and liturgical stimuli to intuition and perception of the divine were the same devotional, meditative, and liturgical exercises that were widely shared by ordinary Christians.

Experience of Christ’s presence often occurs in the context of liturgy, which makes present the Christ who instituted the Eucharist, suffered and died, and rose from the dead. The liturgical year further includes feast days that commemorate events from Christ’s life. The liturgy thus provides a context in which the past is made present and the Christ of biblical narrative becomes manifest. Liturgy and sacrament provide the setting in which Christ is most ordinarily recognized as present. But as chapter 5 suggests, the cycle of liturgical feasts, which bring back memory of past events, was less important in our sources than liturgical services seen as occasions for Christ’s manifestation in the present.

Most of the figures examined in this book are women, but some men also spoke about experiencing Christ’s presence: Meister Eckhart, Henry Suso, Walter Hilton, and others. As chapter 6 proposes, when men talk about Christ’s presence, they typically have in mind the encounter with a person but not a personality. This distinction opens the book’s main contribution to the exploration of mystical presence as a gendered phenomenon.

Chapters 7 and 8 show how the theme of Christ’s recognized presence becomes articulated within the culture and the social dynamics of communities, especially the women’s monastery of Helfta and the south German Dominican convents that produced the sister-books. People speak of experiencing Christ’s presence in large part because they are encouraged to do so and are given pertinent vocabulary by a broader or a more specific community. From the perspective of those within these communities, the ways that Christ becomes manifest are not simply expressions of communal culture, but ways that Christ enters into that culture, accommodating himself to it to make his presence recognizable. This aspect of his manifestation is most fully developed in the literature from Helfta. It is seen in the later sister-books as well, but in those texts the social dynamics that Christ enters into become more prominent.

When the presence of Christ becomes a pervasive experience for women who live not in community but in the secular world or in reclusion, their experience is most often transmitted in the writings of their confessors. It is from the writings of these male companions that we know about the women who received the revelation, their personal relationships (often fraught) with Christ, and their sometimes narrow circles of associates. Chapter 9 centers on a particularly interesting case of this sort, that of Dorothea of Montau, and explores some of the complexities of her relationship with her hagiographer and with Christ. In the hagiographic dossier for Dorothea, Christ appears as a kind of disciplinarian regulating her daily life and piety, as a mystical bridegroom, and as a teacher. Dorothea and her hagiographer presumably both accepted all three perspectives on Christ, but there is reason to think the perception of Christ as a taskmaster in quotidian affairs comes mainly from Dorothea, while his depiction as mystical bridegroom owes a great deal to the hagiographer’s intervention. Because Dorothea exemplifies more fully than any other figure the themes explored in this book, and will already be familiar from references to her in earlier chapters, this chapter serves as a capstone for the book as a whole.

Speaking of Christ as overtly manifest could, of course, become problematic, as chapter 10 demonstrates. Late medieval Christians were keenly aware of the dangers of delusion and self-deception. The absence of Christ was also a factor that complicated a sense of his presence, although his absence in one mode does not preclude his presence in others; if there are different modes of presence, there are also different modes of absence. Chapter 10 discusses how these problems are discussed in the sources.

Even the preliminary survey given here makes clear that the mystical presence of Christ was on the whole found not only more among women than among men but among German women in particular and that women connected with the Dominican order were perhaps even more predisposed in this direction. German women’s houses were characterized by an eager exchange of texts, by contact with the highly mobile Dominican friars who could mediate cultural exchange, and thus by a collective identity that made it easy for the mystical presence of Christ to become widely established as a cultural phenomenon. But the broader point here is the connectedness of ordinary and exceptional religion, so if German women’s monasteries seem more prominent than English laity or the affiliates of Italian friars, that is not because they are entirely distinctive, but because they most fully attest trends that extended throughout the late medieval West.

Sources Used and Sources Not Used

The writings examined here are highly diverse. Often they were in one way or other radically collaborative, involving not only the interaction of subjects and scribes but redactors at various stages and biographers who blurred the line between hagiography and autohagiography. The diverse forms of collaboration make for considerable variety across the body of texts. The nuns of Helfta talked about revelations, shared revelations, wrote down other nuns’ revelations, and collaborated in their textual enshrinement. In the memorable words of Anna Harrison, the writing from Helfta constitutes a densely braided chorus of voices, which are so intertwined in the text because they were so engaged with one another in life.²¹ Despite the collaboration, however, there was strong pressure within later medieval culture to highlight the role of the subject and to privilege the voice of the subject while downplaying the role of others in the collaboration. If there was a first-person voice, that of the person to whom Christ was manifested, that was often taken to be the authorial voice even for works in which there clearly was multiple authorship.²² We speak of the writings of Margaret Ebner or Margery Kempe, and their contemporaries also tended to focus on their first-person voices as authorial, even if there is evidence that others had a role in the recording or editing of their texts. For one of the texts we will draw from, fully six stages of production have been claimed.²³ For a study of an individual text or body of texts, it is clearly important to distinguish whose voice is being heard so far as that is possible, although the distinction is in some cases highly speculative. In a work of synthesis such as this, it is still important to bear in mind that the representation of Christ’s manifestation may owe more to a confessor and biographer than to the subject, and if there were consistent patterns—if, for example, the subjects usually talked about their experience as a form of ordinary piety, and if biographers routinely converted the ordinary into the exceptional—that would be especially significant. What we will find, however, is a set of themes and variations that do not correlate clearly and consistently with forms of authorship. When there are clear distinctions, for example between hagiography and autobiography, those must be noted and examined, but the distinctions do not always relate clearly to differences in genre.

For all the differences among our sources, most of them—and the most important of them—represent literature of revelation.²⁴ They primarily record the revelatory experiences of individuals represented, with varying degrees of plausibility, as their sources and sometimes their authors. Mystical treatises do not figure prominently in this study. Even hagiography is relevant mainly to the extent that it becomes assimilated to the literature of revelation. Obviously crucial differences emerge when revelatory experience becomes molded by someone other than the subject, and particularly when the author is a male hagiographer writing about a female subject. How Raymond of Capua dealt with the experience of Catherine of Siena or how Johannes Marienwerder molded the experience of Dorothea of Montau are questions important for this study.

Many of the texts discussed here were written by and largely for nuns. To some extent the ways of talking about Christ’s presence that we will be examining represent the internal discourse of women’s religious communities. Any community can to some degree develop ways of speaking that are recognized as characteristic of that community, even constitutive for it, giving its members a sense of communal bonding. The ways a community of nuns speak about Christ may not be unique to them or entirely unconnected to the ways outsiders speak, but when the nuns use the phrases they use and tell the stories they tell about Christ, they expect to be heard and understood by insiders more readily and perhaps differently than they would be heard and understood by outsiders. Gertrude Jaron Lewis speaks of texts that were written by women, for women, and about women, and in each case the plural is important: the texts do not represent the mentality of typical women or women utterly apart from the men in the broader society, but they do represent the ways women tended to write when their subjects and their primary audiences were other women.²⁵ Still, the discourse of the convents was shared at least sometimes by women who were not in the community, perhaps in imitation of nuns’ writing, and by male hagiographers of women, and sometimes (if seldom) by men writing about themselves. Women’s religious houses were vitally important for cultivating and popularizing the conventions of this discourse and for giving it a reputation as the discourse of religious women, although convent language is never only convent language. Their influence was widespread, not least because, as Jeffrey Hamburger has said, for late medieval viewers, as for us, the cloistered woman personified piety.²⁶

This is, then, largely a study of women’s religious experience, but within a more specific and a more general context: first, the context provided by personal networks in which women supported each other while clergy served as confessors and biographers, teachers and pupils of holy women, affording both protection and control, and promoting their cult and their writings; second, the broader context of a religious culture in which exceptional piety was grounded in the more ordinary religion shared by clergy and laity, women and men.

Some historians express an interest not so much in lived sanctity but rather in imagined sanctity, the ways holy women are depicted in the accounts of their lives.²⁷ To a great extent I share that approach, but rather than sealing lived and imagined sanctity off from each other I am particularly interested in noting points of convergence between them. I want to explore how far the representation of religion in the sources corresponds to a plausible recreation of psychological process, how medieval ways of talking about the presence of Christ sometimes come close to ways we might talk about such experience, how insiders’ and outsiders’ perspectives partially converge, how imagined sanctity helps give insight into lived sanctity. The main task is to see what would count as verisimilitude in a late medieval setting. Historical verisimilitude will not be the same as what would count for verisimilitude for most in our own culture, but deeper understanding of past criteria should at least make them recognizable from our perspective.

The experience investigated here can be spoken of as Christophany, and another way to think of this book is to say that it studies that phenomenon in texts where that is of primary importance. The word theophany is a traditional and well-known term for manifestations of God, but here we will speak of Christophany to suggest two complementary and equally important points: first, that in late medieval narratives it is Christ in particular whose manifestation is most often sought and expected, not the Father or the undifferentiated deity or godhead; second, that when Christ’s presence is intuited or perceived, his divinity is generally accentuated rather than his humanity, and a Christophany is thus a kind of theophany. Christophany is nearly a synonym for mystical presence, except that the latter accentuates the ubiquitous presence that can be intuited or perceived, while the former refers more squarely to the actual manifestation of that presence.

This study focuses on the interweaving of Christ’s presence with everyday life, which is integral to what we are calling his mystical presence. It does not dwell on the occasional or episodic apparitions that had long been a theme in hagiography and was well known in the late medieval West. Christ’s appearing to Saint Anthony (251–356) after his temptation in the tombs, or his coming to Saint Martin of Tours (316–397) as a needy beggar and then in a dream, are classic stories, echoed in the life of Catherine of Siena (1347–1380).²⁸ In other hagiographic texts Christ appears to a saint bringing a religious conversion or a call to some vocation, as in the life of Vincent Ferrer (1350–1419).²⁹ Again, incidents of this kind do not in themselves bear on the theme of sustained mystical presence. Similarly, Julian of Norwich (1343–ca. 1416) experienced the presence of Christ in a series of revelations as she lay in critical illness, and she clearly saw awareness of his presence as a fundamental datum of her religious experience, but she did not show him returning again and again in her life. Somewhat differently, accounts of prophetic revelation tend to focus on the prophetic message more than on sustained experience of Christ’s presence amid all the particularities of life. During the Great Schism of the Western Church (1378–1417), Christophany was sometimes the basis for claims within the sphere of ecclesiastical politics. Christ was a partisan, and he manifested himself not as the familiar companion of a pious soul but as a defender of what was taken to be the true and valid papacy. Under these circumstances, long familiar notions of Christophany did not simply vanish, but there was an alternative context for Christ’s manifestation. Constance of Rabastens (d. 1386) saw visions and heard the voice of Christ in her sleep, but soon her revelations came to focus overtly on current ecclesiastical politics and on the disasters that threatened Christendom.³⁰ Christ gave Ursulina of Parma (d. 1410) visions almost daily and imparted revelations in which he sent her to Avignon to speak with the antipope.³¹ Her contact with Christ was frequent, but he was not a constant mystical companion in the same way that he was to others. The emphasis had shifted from the presence manifested to the message conveyed.

This book centers, then, on figures of the long fourteenth century—sometimes a bit earlier or later—who reported Christophany as a regular aspect of their religious life and whose reports suggest ways in which they stood out as exceptional yet also ways in which their experiences were in continuity with that of more ordinary Christians of their time.

Methodological Principles

There is more than one way to approach the connection between the ordinary and the exceptional. One option is to trace the popular diffusion of mystical writing in the form of generally accessible devotional texts, which Bernard McGinn refers to as mysticism for the many.³² Focusing on the specific theme of the soul as the bride of Christ, Rabia Gregory shows how a notion articulated in twelfth-century texts for nuns became popularized in late medieval literature: not just mystics of high attainment, and not only nuns, but all Christians could become brides of Christ.³³ To some extent that approach is relevant to this book, because some of the texts examined here, especially those from the convent at Helfta, reached popular audiences when passages became included in devotional miscellanies.³⁴ Another possibility is to see how religious themes and concerns such as penitence or devotion to Christ’s Passion are shared between the exceptionally pious and ordinary devout Christians and woven into texts of all sorts. My earlier book Unquiet Souls dealt with such thematic embeddedness of the exceptional within the ordinary, with key themes in fourteenth-century hagiography that can be found as well in broader religious culture, although I was dealing there largely with formal hagiography, in which there is rarely any suggestion of a fluid continuity between the exceptional and the ordinary. In that earlier book I also emphasized how the saints’ piety is often set forth as more to be wondered at than imitated (magis admiranda quam imitanda), but also as urging that if the saints can carry their religion to its extremes, then a fortiori others should be capable of ordinary virtue. The emphasis was not on continuity between the saints’ experience of the divine and other people’s experience, but on their sharing in a religious culture steeped in the cultivation of patience and penitence and deeply absorbed in the Passion of Christ.³⁵ In the present book I remain interested in shared religious culture, and I discuss prayers and meditative literature, liturgical observances, scripted meditations, and images that link the exceptionally vivid sense of Christ’s presence with widely shared attention to Christ. More often, however, the focus here is on a subtler factor: the distinction between stronger and weaker claims to exceptionality, between cases at one end of the spectrum where the experience of Christ’s presence is clearly privileged and those at the other end where it is represented as accessible in principle to all. To a large extent, therefore, this is an inquiry not simply into experience but into claims about experience, and the question is how far accounts of exceptional experience open onto the possibility of continuity with more ordinary piety.

There was, inevitably, room for ambiguity. We may have a clear sense of the distinction between imitanda and admiranda, the deeds of the saints meant to be imitated and those set out as occasion for wonderment, but imitanda may be expressed and even experienced as admiranda: ways of experiencing Christ’s presence that might otherwise seem ordinary may be represented as extraordinary because they occur to a person of exceptional piety, or they may actually shade into extraordinary experience because of the individual’s intense sensibilities and reactions.³⁶ Sensing the presence of Christ is something Christians have in common, but also something that sets some apart from others. In the historical sources we may be reading an account of an extraordinary experience, or we may be reading an extraordinary account of a more ordinary one, a dramatization of the everyday. This very ambiguity gives the theme much of its interest.

Like many medievalists, I work at the crossroads of disciplines. The figures studied in this book lend themselves to interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary examination, and the scholars who have written about them include historians, theologians, literary specialists, and others. I have benefited from the work of colleagues who approach the subject from these various perspectives, and my notes to some extent reflect what I have learned from them. If I do not engage with all of them as deeply as some readers might wish, that is because I am asking different questions, and insights that are valuable in themselves and important to a different line of inquiry are not always relevant to my project.

At heart I remain a historian, but in this book I write as a particular kind of historian, concerned chiefly to show how things made sense within a specific context. I take note of change over time, and I suggest factors within cultural history that help account for that change. I trace how different voices can be heard in the framing of a text, especially in my chapter on Dorothea of Montau. I ask about the ways the texts reveal conceptions of gender, especially in my discussion of person and personality and of Dorothea. I touch lightly on reception history, especially the reception of the literature from Helfta. All these matters, however, have been discussed well by other writers, and while they are relevant to my work, they are not central. In the first two chapters I deal with theology, and in the next I discuss psychological processes as they are suggested in the texts (however closely or distantly the texts mirror what was going on in the minds and souls of the subjects), but still I write as a historian making sense of sense-making, not as a theologian or a psychologist.

This study is meant as historical not only in its focus on texts from a specific period but more importantly in its understanding of these texts as a particular outgrowth of that period’s religious culture, grounded in the same historical conditions as other manifestations of that culture. Late medieval devotionalism no doubt had roots in earlier religious practice, particularly that of the monasteries, but there had never been a time when devotional conventions were so widespread, so varied in their manifestations, so fully embraced by both religious and laity, so deeply integrated into everyday life, or so thoroughly entwined with networks of communication that cut across boundaries of language, social status, and religious orders. Increasing literacy even among laity was one condition for this devotional revolution. Ready availability of devotional reading matter, on affordable paper more than parchment, was another. The cultivated habits of private and silent reading and the cultivation of inwardness, or preoccupation with interior thoughts and sensibilities, were yet others. Some might prefer to think of the minimal practice expected of a Christian, which was not to the same degree historically particular, as the ordinary religion of the era.³⁷ The conventions of late medieval devotionalism went beyond the minimum, and it is this emerging devotionalism that serves as the ordinary foil to the more exceptional phenomena discussed in this book.

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1. SB Engelthal, 36.

2. I have discussed this phenomenon in Major Currents in Late Medieval Devotion, in Christian Spirituality, ed. Jill Raitt, 75–108 (New York: Crossroad, 1987), and in Today’s Shocks, Yesterday’s Conventions, in Something Fearful: Medievalist Scholars on the Religious Turn: A Special Issue of Religion & Literature 42 (2010): 253–78. My article Convention and Conversion: Patterns in Late Medieval Piety, Church History 67 (1998): 32–51, also deals with the interaction of devotionalism and mysticism, of ordinary and exceptional religious experience.

3. Iohannes de Caulibus, Meditaciones vite Christi olim S. Bonaventure attributae, ed. M. Stallings-Taney (Turnhout: Brepols, 1997); John of Caulibus, Meditations on the Life of Christ, trans. Francis X. Taney et al. (Asheville, NC: Pegagus, 2000); Ludolph of Saxony, The Life of Jesus Christ, trans. Milton T. Walsh (Athens, OH: Cistercian Publications; Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2018-).

4. R. W. Pfaff, New Liturgical Feasts in Later Medieval England (Oxford: Clarendon, 1970).

5. Liber precum, National Library of Russia (St. Petersburg), Ms Lat. O.v.1.206, fol. 16v: O domine ihesu da michi semper desiderare te fontem luminis vt non prius de hac vita exeam quam te oculis cordis videam. Amen.

6. Jeffrey F. Hamburger, Nuns as Artists: The Visual Culture of a Medieval Convent (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 94–95.

7. Sedulius, Carmen paschale, 2.132–33, in The Paschal Song and Hymns, trans. Carl P. E. Springer (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2013), 52–53: Praesens Christus erat, qui sancta pericula semper/ Suscipit et poenas alieno in corpore sentit.

8. Matthew 28:16–20 (the Great Commission), 25:31–46 (the Last Judgment), and cf. 18:20; I Corinthians 11:20–34a, 12:12–28, 6:15–20.

9. St. Athanasius, On the Incarnation: The Treatise De incarnatione Verbi Dei, trans. and ed. by a religious of C.S.M.V., new ed. (1963; repr. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary, 1989), 45: His body was for Him not a limitation, but an instrument, so that He was both in it and in all things, and outside all things, resting in the Father alone. At one and the same time—this is the wonder—as Man He was living a human life, and as Word He was sustaining the life of the universe, and as Son He was in constant union with the Father.

10. Larry W. Hurtado, Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003), 619–25.

11. Athanasius, Life of Antony, c. 10, in Early Christian Lives, trans. and ed. Carolinne White (London: Penguin, 1998), 16; Sulpicius Severus, Life of Martin of Tours, 3.1–4, in White, Early Christian Lives, 137–38; Thomas of Celano, Second Life of St. Francis, 1.6.10, in Placid Hermann, ed. and trans., St. Francis of Assisi: First and Second Life of St. Francis, with Selections from Treatise on the Miracles of Blessed Francis (Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1963), 144; Dyan Elliott, True Presence / False Christ: The Antinomies of Embodiment in Medieval Spirituality, Mediaeval Studies 64 (2002): 253. A still useful starting point for locating stories about Christ in hagiography is E. Cobham Brewer, A Dictionary of Miracles, Imitative, Realistic, and Dogmatic (Philadelphia, 1894), 543–44.

12. Heinrich Lausberg, Der Hymnus Jesu dulcis memoria (Munich: Hueber, 1967); Helen Deeming, "Music and Contemplation in the Twelfth-Century Dulcis Jesu memoria," Journal of the Royal Musical Association 139 (2014): 1–39.

13. Personal communication from Paul Lachance, O.F.M., August 22, 2009.

14. G. Scott Sparrow, I Am with You Always: True Stories of Encounters with Jesus (New York: Bantam, 1995); Phillip H. Wiebe, Visions of Jesus: Direct Encounters from the New Testament to Today (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Phillip H. Wiebe, Critical Reflections on Christic Visions, in Cognitive Models and Spiritual Maps: Interdisciplinary Explorations of Religious Experience, ed. Jensine Andresen and Robert K. C. Forman, Journal of Consciousness Studies 7, nos. 11–12 (2000): 119–41. See also Simone Weil, Spiritual Autobiography, in Waiting on God, trans. Emma Craufurd (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1951), 24: Sometimes … during this recitation [of the Our Father] or at other moments, Christ is present with me in person; but his presence is infinitely more real, more moving, more clear than on that first occasion when he took possession of me. For very different articulations of the theme, see Father Germanus of St. Stanislaus, The Life of the Servant of God Gemma Galgani, an Italian Maiden of Lucca, trans. A. M. O’Sullivan (London and Edinburgh: Sands, 1913), 218–20, and Anthony Bloom, School for Prayer (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1970), xi–xii.

15. VCS 1.9.86, Kearns, 78; VCS 1.11.112, Kearns, 103.

16. See Pierre Rousselot and Joseph Huby, Christianity in the Middle Ages, in The Life of the Church, ed. Pierre Rousselot, Léonce de Grandmaison, Joseph Huby, Alexandre Brou, and Martin Cyril D’Arcy (London: Sheed & Ward, 1932), 181: "The great novelty, the incomparable merit, of the middle ages was mankind’s understanding of, and love for, or rather, what might better be called passion for, Christ. The Word made flesh, homo Christus Jesus, is no longer merely the model to be imitated, the guide to be followed and also the uncreated light that illumines the interior of the soul; but He is also immanent in the soul even in His human nature; He is the spouse of the soul, acting with her and in her, He is the friend." The idea expressed here is apt, but it applies unevenly to medieval spiritual writing. The texts examined in this book represent the fullest development of the theme.

17. Thomas of Cantimpré, The Collected Saints’ Lives: Abbot John of Cantimpré, Christina the Astonishing, Margaret of Ypres, and Lutgard of Aywières, ed. Barbara Newman, trans. Margot H. King and Barbara Newman (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008), 1.2, p. 218; 1.12, pp. 226–27; 1.19, p. 234; 1.22, p. 238; 2.5, p. 243; 2.17, p. 252; 2.21, p. 256; 2.33, p. 262; 3.9–12, pp. 281–84; 3.17, p. 289. Contact in the context of intercession in 2.3, p. 241; 2.4, p. 242; 2.6, pp. 243–44; 2.9–10, p. 246–47; 2.19–20, pp. 254–55; 3.5, p. 278.

18. Martinus Cowley, trans., Send Me God: The Lives of Ida the Compassionate of Nivelles, Nun lf La Ramée, Arnulf, Lay Brother of Villers, and Abundus, Monk of Villers, by Goswin of Bossut (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003), c. 26a, p. 72; c. 26b, p. 73; c. 4a, p. 37; c. 9b, p. 44; c. 23b, pp. 67–68; c. 29b-4, p. 80.

19. E.g., SB Adelhausen, 162 (Wann do Gott an dem crútze stuond), 157 (Do Gottes sun an dem crútze hieng). Ida of Nivelles spoke to God, addressing him as sweetest Jesus and asking why he had to endure death on the cross; see Cowley, Send Me God, c. 29b-3, p. 79.

20. Ellen K. Rentz, Imagining the Parish in Late Medieval England (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2015), 79.

21. Anna Harrison, ‘Oh! What Treasure Is in This Book?’: Writing, Reading, and Community at the Monastery of Helfta, Viator 39 (2008): 96; see also Anna Harrison, Thousands and Thousands of Lovers: Sense of Community among the Nuns of Helfta (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press / Cistercian Publications, 2022), 38. Cf. Margarete Hubrath, Schreiben und Erinnern: Zur memoria im Liber specialis gratiae Mechthilds von Hakeborn (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1996), 36–48.

22. Balázs Nemes, Von der Schrift zum Buch, von Ich zum Autor: Zur Text- und Autorkonstitution in Überlieferung und Rezeption des ›Fließenden Lichts der Gottheit‹ Mechthilds von Magdeburg (Tübingen: Francke, 2010), 358–80, discusses numerous examples, not only that of Mechthild of Magdeburg. See also Balázs J. Nemes, "Text Production and Authorship: Gertrude of Helfta’s Legatus divinae pietatis," in A Companion to Mysticism and Devotion in Northern Germany in the Late Middle Ages, ed. Elizabeth Andersen (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 120. P. Dinzelbacher, «Revelationes» (Turnhout: Brepols, 1991), 42–57, gives an overview of the modes of texual production.

23. Klaus Grubmüller, Die Viten der Schwestern zu Töss und Elsbeth Stagel (Überlieferung und Einheit), Zeitschrift für deutsches Altertum und deutsche Literatur, 98 (1969): 201–4.

24. On revelations as a genre, see Dinzelbacher, «Revelationes», 16: Jeder Text, der mit dem Anspruch auftritt, eine unmittelbara Botschaft Gottes (oder seiner Heiligen und Engel) zu verkündigen, gehört zur literarischen Gattung des Offenbarungsschrifttums. Only a subset of Dinzelbacher’s revelations is relevant here, the most obvious limitation being the focus on revelations specifically of Christ. As will become clear, the texts that Dinzelbacher categorizes as revelations overlap significantly with hagiography and with the collective accounts of the sister-books.

25. Gertrud Jaron Lewis, By Women, for Women, about Women: The Sister-Books of Fourteenth-Century Germany (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1996). Rabia Gregory, in Marrying Jesus in Medieval and Early Modern Northern Europe: Popular Culture and Religious Reform (Farnham: Ashgate, 2016), 172–73, warns that "singling out the material culture of medieval convents as something by and for women recreates the nineteenth-century ghettoizing of nuns." But see the formulations of the point in Harrison, Thousands and Thousands of Lovers, 7 and 51.

26. Hamburger, Nuns as Artists, 112.

27. John W. Coakley, Women, Men, and Spiritual Power: Female Saints and Their Male Collaborators (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 5–6.

28. VCS 1.11.109–10, Kearns, 101–2; VCS 2.3.134–37, Kearns, 129–32.

29. Laura Ackerman Smoller, The Saint and the Chopped-Up Baby: The Cult of Vincent Ferrer in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014), 6, 8, 96, 133, 141-42, 162, 164; see also Martha G. Newman, Crucified by the Virtues: Monks, Lay Brothers, and Women in Thirteenth-Century Cistercian Saints’ Lives, in Gender and Difference in the Middle Ages, ed. Sharon A. Farmer and Carol Braun Pasternack (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 186 and 192-93.

30. Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski and Bruce L. Venarde, eds. and trans., Two Women of the Great Schism: The Revelations of Constance de Rabastens by Raymond de Sabanac and Life of the Blessed Ursulina of Parma by Simone Zanacchi (Toronto: Center for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2010), 38–39 (nos. 1, 3, 5), 41 (nos. 12–13), 42–47 (nos. 16–17, 20–21, 23, 26); Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Poets, Saints, and Visionaries of the Great Schism, 1378–1417 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006), 34–35, 61–75, 92–93.

31. Blumenfeld-Kosinski and Venarde, Two Women of the Great Schism, 82–84 (paras. 9, 11–12), 87 (paras. 16), 91–92 (paras. 22–23); Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Poets, Saints, and Visionaries, 86–89; André Vauchez, The Laity in the Middle Ages: Religious Beliefs and Devotional Practices, ed. Daniel E. Bornstein, trans Margery J. Schneider (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993), 219–30.

32. Bernard McGinn, The Harvest of Mysticism in Medieval Germany (1300–1500) (New York: Crossroad, 2005), 299–483.

33. Gregory, Marrying Jesus.

34. See especially Racha Kirakosian, From the Material to the Mystical in Late Medieval Piety: The Vernacular Transmission of Gertrude of Helfta’s Visions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021).

35. Richard Kieckhefer, Unquiet Souls: Fourteenth-Century Saints and Their Religious Milieu (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). Even when I wrote that book, I found its chapter on rapture and revelations to be the least satisfying, and the present book turns back to explore the themes of that chapter more fully. In other work of mine I have explored the relationship between ordinary and specialized culture in terms of a common tradition (defined in a negative sense as beliefs and practices that cannot be assigned to any particular subgroups) and the culture of various more specific groups; see Magic in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), chap. 4.

36. Kieckhefer, Unquiet Souls, 13; Caroline Walker Bynum, Wonder, American Historical Review 102 (1997): 10–12.

37. On that matter, see Norman P. Tanner and Sethina Watson, Least of the Laity: The Minimum Requirements for a Medieval Christian, Journal of Medieval History 32, no. 4 (2006): 395–423.

PART ONE

The Subject and Manner of Manifestation

CHAPTER 1

Divine Person, Divine and Human Natures

Kneeling in a chapel, Margery Kempe (ca. 1373–ca. 1438) wept and begged forgiveness for her sins. Christ suddenly came to her, identifying himself as the Christ who died on the cross, then adding, I the same God forgive you your sins entirely. Again soon afterward he said, I am the same God who brought her sins to mind and caused her to confess them.¹ In this passage Christ does not deny his humanity, but he highlights the divinity by which he dances through time, working redemption on the cross at one point, inspiring her contrition at another, but identically the same person in these and other moments.

One of the best known themes in R. W. Southern’s Making of the Middle Ages is the high medieval shift in focus from the divinity to the humanity of Christ. In their different ways, Anselm of Canterbury (1033–1109) and Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153) contributed to a new feeling about the humanity of the Saviour, opening the way for a fresh appreciation of the human sufferings of the Redeemer, the figure on the cross now seen with a new clarity to be that of a Man, the incidents of his human history serving more and more as subject for meditation. The crucifixion had previously evoked a sense of remote and majestic divine power, but the focus now was the extreme limits of human suffering.² The theme has been taken up by many historians since Southern wrote in the 1950s; indeed, it has become a commonplace in the literature.³ Sometimes the shift or its intensification is ascribed largely to the Franciscans, with their loving attention to the infancy and the death of Christ, his helplessness in the manger, and his agony on the cross. The later medieval emphasis on Christ’s humanity is so generally acknowledged that it seems perhaps incontrovertible.

One reason that the humanity of Christ has loomed large in scholarly literature is the recognition that writers of the later medieval West, mainly but not exclusively women, saw themselves as sharing in Christ’s suffering. Their own sufferings, physical and sometimes also interpersonal, were means by which they were assimilated to Christ in his Passion.⁴ The extreme case was the stigmatic, who bore the wounds of Christ on his or her own flesh. But while it was the assumed human nature that made Christ’s suffering possible, it was the eternally divine person who bore that suffering. In this respect, participation in the