Proving Woman (12 page)

Unable to come up with viable orthodox alternatives, the ecclesiastical authorities cast about for other methods of discrediting
heretical martyrs. The theologian William of Auvergne, for example, asks explicitly why heretics often prefer their error
to their lives and, what appears to be even greater madness, willingly embrace death with every semblance of joy. He can only
conclude that they are demonically possessed.
⁶⁵
Inquisitor Stephen of Bourbon would turn to the exemplum tradition to make his point. Differing with William’s observation
of the exultant heretical death, Stephen will argue that heretics do not die with the joy of martyrs but with their eyes cast
down in sorrow (which indicated to one wise man that the heretics realized that they would never rise to heaven). Unlike most
human flesh, which, according to Stephen, smells rather good when burned, heretics give forth a disgusting stench. Instead
of healing, their “pseudorelics” actually blinded an individual in search of a cure for an eye infection.
⁶⁶
Caesarius of Heisterbach’s strategy was to expose ostensible incidents of heretical bravery as fraudulent: certain heretics
of Besan- ç on, who reputedly worked dramatic miracles like walking on water or passing through fire unscathed, were enabled
by the indentures that the devil had sewn into their arms. The bishop had the amulets removed (unfortunately he stooped to
consulting a necromancer in order to uncover the heretical ruse), and suddenly the heretics became panicstricken when confronted
by the hitherto friendly fire. The mob threw them into the flames and they perished.
⁶⁷

The bravado implicit in such orthodox disparagement should not be taken at face value. The clergy continued to be exceedingly
anxious about heretical claims of martyrdom—an anxiety that would, as we shall see, play a role in transforming orthodoxy’s
own profile of sanctity. James of Vitry’s retaliatory initiative on behalf of orthodoxy is at the forefront of this change.
First, James foregrounds the holiness of the war against the Albigensians throughout Mary’s vita. Mary of Oignies is cast
as the recipient of a vision anticipating the Albigensian Crusade, wherein its “holy martyrs” are ushered directly into heaven,
bypassing purgatory. This vision was portentous enough to merit inclusion in contemporary chronicles treating the Albigensian
Crusade. Mary also longs to make a pilgrimage to the south of France: “ ‘there I would honour my Lord by witnessing His name
where so many impious men have denied him through blasphemy.’ ”
⁶⁸
AndréVauchez has particularly emphasized the way James attempted to pit female asceticism against the awesome rigors of the
Cathar Perfect.
⁶⁹
In fact, James’s daring reaches beyond this already ambitious program. He actually attempts to advance his holy women as types
of martyrs whose self-imposed sufferings would be sufficiently compelling to eclipse the drama of heretical burnings altogether.

This initiative was grounded in the deflection from literal martyrdom already afoot in the early church. Even in the third
century, Cyprian had distinguished between the two kinds of martyrdom: a red martyrdom signified the kind of persecution that
eventuated in death, while a white martyrdom was associated with purity (particularly virginity) and ascetical inner suffering.
This recognition of substitute forms of martyrdom would become especially widespread with the triumph of Christianity in the
West.
⁷⁰
The distinct modes of martyrdom came to be associated with flowers: red roses for external martyrdom versus white lilies for
internal martyrdom.
⁷¹
The two frequently went together: hence a virgin martyr like Cecilia would be rewarded with roses and lilies. But with the
conversion of the West, white martyrdom frequently had to stand alone. Gregory the Great (d. 604) distinguishes between a
literal public martyrdom and the secret martyrdom that is effected “whenever the soul is eager and ready for suffering even
if there is no open persecution.” Similarly, Gregory stipulates that “the confessors of Christ served as persecutors of themselves
and applied the various tortures of abstinence.”
⁷²
In the High Middle Ages, Thomas Becket (d. 1170) would be generally presumed to have satisfied the criteria for both red and
white martyrdom—a happy concurrence since, according to Caesarius of Heisterbach, certain Parisian masters were disinclined
to credit Becket with the title of martyr as he was not perceived as having died for the faith.
⁷³

Building on past tradition, James and his hagiographical successors press the very limits of self-mortification so that the
distinction between the red and the white martyrdom dissolves, even as the boundaries between the living and the dead give
way. In so doing, they invite the super-natural to advance into contemporary life in an unprecedented manner, thereby transforming
conceptions of sanctity forever.
⁷⁴
Thus when Mary of Oignies punished herself for a remembered sin by hacking away a piece from the side of her body, the severe
pain she endured actually induced a mystical ecstasy in which Mary understood herself to be standing beside a seraph.
⁷⁵
Indeed, Mary’s ascetical efforts, generally, were depicted as so extreme as to provoke supernatural reactions: either divine
reward or diabolical interference. These acts of self-mortification are, moreover, framed within the larger context of James’s
prologue, which is particularly replete with the rhetoric of persecution. The Beguines are repeatedly described as being under
constant attack by hostile critics.
⁷⁶
Their chastity and even their lives are represented as at risk from the troops of the duke of Brabant during the sack of
Li[egrave]ge in 1212. A number of the Beguines jumped into rivers or even sewers, choosing a malodorous martyrdom over physical
defilement.
⁷⁷

Miraculously, not one of these women drowned. Nor were the Beguine mystics portrayed as dying from their austerities. Had
they deliberately hastened their own deaths, they would have died in mortal sin and, thus, as excommunicates who would not
even be permitted burial in consecrated ground. These women were not dying, but the heretics were. Thomas of Cantimpré, who
was prepared to leave nothing to chance, insisted on spelling out precisely how the terms of orthodox martyrdom were transformed
in the present age, lest the ones who literally suffered death be construed as the real martyrs. He thus asserts orthodoxy’s
claims by the strategy of symbolic substitution—an effect we can see at work in a repeated image in the lives of both Margaret
of Ypres and Lutgard of Aywi[egrave]res. At the time of her conversion, Margaret was recalled from the brink of carnal marriage
as a result of Friar Zeger’s intervention. Soon after her death, she appeared to one of her friends in a crystalline body
with a red stain at the breast. Smiling, she spoke to him with words evoking those of Saint Agnes, a virgin martyr and one
of the most famous of the early church’s many spurners of marriage: “ ‘Behold, what I have desired, I now see; what I hoped
for, I now possess.’ ” When interpreting Margaret’s appearance, Thomas alludes to the appropriate admixture of red and white
in terms of the traditional symbols of martyred virgins: roses standing for blood and lilies for virginity. However, Thomas
makes a subtle adjustment: while the white lilies still refer to virginity, the red roses designate her love for Christ.
⁷⁸

Such subtle allusions become more insistent in the life of Lutgard. Like Margaret, Lutgard had been enamored of a young man
but was released from this worldly attachment by a vision of the crucified Christ. Some time later, a noble matron prophesied
that she would be a second Agnes. When her young man approached soon after this prophecy, Lutgard rejected him in the exact
terms in which Agnes had rejected her importunate suitor.
⁷⁹
Furthermore, once embarked upon the religious life, Lutgard began to long for martyrdom: “But because the time of martyrdom
had passed like the winter and the rains had come and gone (Cant. 2.11), Christ prepared for her another kind of martyrdom.”
On a particular night after compline, when her desire to be martyred “like the most blessed Agnes” had reached a new level
of urgency, a large vein in her breast burst, causing considerable blood loss. Christ immediately appeared to assure Lutgard
that her fervent wish for martyrdom had been granted: she had earned the same merit of martyrdom as had Agnes in the course
of her passion. Thomas then alludes to this fulfillment of the matron’s prophecy and goes on to celebrate Lutgard’s reception
of “the crown of martyrdom in this time of peace.”
⁸⁰

The question “Peace for whom?” quivers uneasily in the air. This seemingly innocuous characterization is, in fact, ferocious
in its uncompromising negations. For the first half of the thirteenth century was especially marked by a series of unforgettable
mass executions that characterized the harsh summary justice of the early heretical trials.
⁸¹
In particular, the Cathar stronghold of Montsé gur, besieged for many months by a large crusading army in retaliation for
the massacre at Avignonet, finally fell in March of 1244. More than two hundred Cathars, many of them members of the Perfect
elite who refused to renounce their faith, were burned in a massive enclosure of poles and stakes where, according to chronicler
William of Puylaurens, they “passed over to the fire of hell.”Written in 1246, Thomas’s elegiac assertion that “the time of
martyrdom had passed” and his characterization of the era as a “time of peace” use Lutgard’s symbolic martyrdom to efface
the empirical evidence of heretical counterclaims.
⁸²

But perhaps Thomas’s most ambitious attempt to realign the rhetoric of martyrdom with contemporary penitential devotion occurs
in the final chapter of the first book of
Concerning Bees
. Beginning with the exemplary behavior of bees and their alleged fatal mourning over the death of their “king,” Thomas reflects
unfavorably on humanity’s detachment over the death of parents, something that he interprets as a corruption of nature.
⁸³
In contrast, Thomas upholds the age of the martyrs, when individuals would gladly shed their own blood for their “father”
Christ, while Christ, in keeping with Ps. 115.15, cited at the beginning of this section, rejoiced in their death.
⁸⁴
The subsequent exhortation to die on behalf of Christ is followed by four powerful exempla.
⁸⁵
A man from Dinan visited the Holy Land in 1216. When he reached Calvary, his very empathy for Christ’s passion burst the veins
in his heart and he died.
⁸⁶
The second tale concerns a certain Dominican from Strasbourg who had always piously crossed himself over his breast with his
thumb. After his death, his breastbone, in conjunction with two of his ribs, was revealed to contain an image of a cross decorated
by lilies—a marvel that Thomas saw with his own eyes.
⁸⁷
(The lilies are, of course, representative of how white martyrdom can vie with the red through its dramatic physical effects.)
The third episode concerns a woman from Brabant who, as a result of her profound meditations on Christ’s passion, developed
a huge wound in her side—a fact to which many trustworthy Dominicans attested. Some of the blood that had issued from the
wound was preserved in a vial that Thomas had himself seen. Nor had the liquid corrupted in any way.
⁸⁸

Although the first three of these incidents are carefully situated in time and place, the fourth is less exact and could be
construed as something of an adaptation of the martyrdom of Saint Ignatius (d. ca. 107). A pious Christian “around our own
time” was the captive of a pagan tyrant. When asked by his master why he was always so mournful, the Christian responded that
he grieved for his Lord’s death and carried the signs (
stigmata
) of his passion in his heart. When Ignatius had made a similar statement to his executioner, the literal truth of his claim
was proved subsequent to his martyrdom by an autopsy. Thomas offers a vigorous reconceptualization of the motif insofar as
the claim itself occasions the martyrdom. The incredulous tyrant not only ripped open his servant’s breast but had his heart
cut in two, only to find an impression of the crucified Christ. This miracle precipitated the conversion of the tyrant and
his followers.
⁸⁹

The basic strategy at work in these tales is to substitute instances of miraculous somatism so that devotion and love for
God perform the function that had traditionally been assigned to the tyrant’s delegated torturer in the lives of early martyrs.
Thus Thomas is, in a sense, replicating the substitution that was explained in Margaret’s life and effected in Lutgard’s,
wherein the roses, hitherto representing martyrdom, came to symbolize love. His masterstroke, however, is to retain a tyrant
who effects a literal martyrdom and thus becomes the agent through whom the spontaneous and self-imposed martyrdom is revealed.
This decision is symbolically and structurally salient. As the final episode in book 1, the story resonates with the last
episode of book 2, which concerns a martyrdom of a very different stripe. A heretic, fleeing from inquisitors, pretends that
he is a demoniac in order to conceal his identity—a ruse that a number of clerics claim to be rather common among heretics.
⁹⁰
While he is hiding out in a church, allegedly awaiting a cure, a fellow demoniac, who happens to be a cleric, covers him with
straw and burns him.
⁹¹
This resolution turns on the heretic’s misrecognition, which gives rise to the truth—a situation paralleling the familiar
tale of the appointment in Samarra. A man sees Death making a threatening gesture at him in a market in Baghdad and rides
to Samarra to escape his doom. But it turns out that Death’s gesture was merely an expression of surprise at seeing the man
in Baghdad since they had an appointment that evening in Samarra. In both stories, efforts to escape death are indeed complicit
with the inexorable workings of divine justice, alternately meted out by the figure of Death or the figure of the possessed
cleric.
⁹²