Elliott - Proving woman : female spirituality and inquisitional culture in the later Middle Ages

Proving Woman

Proving Woman

FEMALE SPIRITUALITY AND INQUISITIONAL CULTURE IN THE LATER MIDDLE AGES

Dyan Elliott

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

PRINCETON AND OXFORD

Copyright 2004 by Princeton University Press

Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street,

Princeton, New Jersey 08540

In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 3 Market Place,

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Elliott, Dyan, 1954

Proving woman : female spirituality and inquisitional culture in the later Middle Ages / Dyan Elliott.

p.cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

eISBN: 978-1-40082-602-5

1. WomenReligious lifeHistory. 2. Church historyMiddle Ages, 6001500.

3. MysticismHistoryMiddle Ages, 6001500. 4. Women mysticsEurope.

5. HeresyHistoryTo 1500. 6. Inquisition. I. Title.

BR163.E55 2004

270.5'082dc222003053680

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

This book has been composed in Sabon

Printed on acid-free paper.

pup.princeton.edu

Printed in the United States of America

1 3 5 7 9 1 0 8 6 4 2

For Gail Vanstone

proven friend, whose friendship has meant so much

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

MANY DEBTS of gratitude were incurred during the writing of this book. I have been the fortunate beneficiary of considerable institutional support. At the top of the list is the ongoing generosity and encouragement that I have received from my home institution, Indiana University, and the Department of History, in particular. I would especially like to thank the chair of my department, John Bodnar, for his support. I have also been blessed with the opportunity to work in some lovely, even enchanted, places, for which I am forever grateful. In the academic year of 199697, I was the recipient of an ACLS (American Council of Learned Societies) fellowship while a member of the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study. The following year, I was a fellow at the National Humanities Center in the Research Triangle, North Carolina. In the spring of 2002, I was the Visiting Meaker Professor of Medieval Studies at the University of Bristol and then a fellow at the Rockefeller Foundations beautiful Villa Serbelloni in Bellagio, Italy. Many thanks to my fellow residents and colleagues for the stimulation and pleasure they provided in these remarkable venues. I have particularly benefited from the wisdom, humor, and friendship of Fernando Cervantes (whom I first met at Princeton and would joyfully reencounter at the University of Bristol); Peter Jelavich and Judy Klein (from the National Humanities Center); and Carolyn Muessig and Elizabeth Archibald (University of Bristol). I would also like to thank the wonderful members of my postgraduate seminar in Bristol on gender and popular religion, who taught me all about learned pub nightsa sadly neglected discipline in North America.

Thanks to Peter Jelavich, who helped me with some German translations and stoically read and commented on the entire manuscript; to Paul Strohm, who read and commented on several chapters; and to the anonymous readers of Princeton University Press, who I have since learned to my own (and the manuscripts) good fortune were Penelope Johnson and Barbara Newman. I am additionally appreciative for the support of my editor, Brigitta van Rheinberg, and of Lauren Lepowmanuscript editor extraordinaire! Working with Brigitta was a new pleasure. But I had worked with Lauren earlier with such happy results that I would spend months scheming over how I could ensure being assigned to her again. As before, the experience has been deeply gratifying.

Chapter 4 incorporates sections of my articles Dominae or Dominatae? Female Mystics and the Trauma of Textuality (in Women, Marriage,and Family in Medieval Christendom: Essays in Memory ofMichael M. Sheehan, C.S.B., ed. Constance Rousseau and Joel Rosenthal [Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval Institute Publications, 1998], pp. 4777); The Physiology of Rapture and Female Spirituality (in Medieval Theologyand the Natural Body, ed. Peter Biller and Alastair Minnis [Wood-bridge, Suffolk: York Medieval Press in association with Boydell and Brewer, 1997], pp. 14173); andWomen and Confession: From Empowerment to Pathology (in Gendering the Master Narrative: Women andPower in the Middle Ages, ed. Mary Erler and Maryanne Kowaleski [Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2003], pp. 3151). The lions share of chapter 7 is a condensed version of Seeing Double: John Gerson, the Discernment of Spirits, and Joan of Arc (American Historical Review 107 [2002]: 2654). I would like to thank the respective presses for the right to make use of this material.

I cannot imagine writing this book without the unstinting and loving support of certain other friends, who were always there during the trying times when my focus mysteriously shifted from Proving Woman to Proving Dyan. David Brakke, Dori Elliott, Mary Favret, Susan Gubar, Don Gray, Wendy Harris, Pat Phillips, Carol Ribner, and Mary Jo Weaver all deserve my heartfelt thanks. But I particularly wish to acknowledge my enduring indebtedness to Gail Vanstone, to whom this book is dedicated.

Proving Woman

Introduction

THIS BOOK addresses the trajectory of female spirituality over the course of the High and later Middle Ages. From a certain perspective, it is a familiar story to which all students of the medieval and early modern periods can supply the ending: during this period, female spirituality (always already suspect) is progressively perceived as a substantial threat to the church and society at large. This gradual criminalization of female spirituality parallels the progressive efforts to constrain and even persecute women, an impetus most dramatically illustrated in the witch-hunts of the early modern period. Therefore this book is not really about what happens to female spirituality, but about why it happens. It attempts to isolate a constellation of factors that help to explain this process.

At the very center of this problem are the various convulsions medieval society was undergoing around the time of the Fourth Lateran Council (1215). As papal antidote to contemporary confusion, Lateran IV is undoubtedly the clearest statement we have of the problems confronting the medieval church in this period as viewed through the lens of the higher clergy. Although the problems are legion, there are several strands that are of particular importance to this study: the threat of heresy; the regulation of sanctity; the new emphasis on the sacraments, particularly confession and the eucharist; and the introduction of the inquisitional procedure. From the perspective of the church hierarchys disciplinary measures, these three strands are strategically interwoven in the fight against heresy: heretical antisacramentalism is countered by a due reverence for the sacraments, which becomes one of the benchmarks of orthodoxy; saints are newly perceived as key players in the struggle against heresyhence an emphasis on the sacraments becomes intrinsic to con-temporary profiles of sanctity; the inquisitional procedure will soon be adopted as the instrument for assessing both sanctity and heresy; and the sacrament of confession, made mandatory for the first time at the council, emerges as a new proof of orthodoxy, obliquely corresponding to the emphasis placed on confession in inquisitional procedure. All of these considerations are implicated in the way in which female spirituality is portrayed in this period.