Proving Woman (14 page)

The extent to which women’s peculiar interstitial position between living and dead recommends them for their mission on behalf
of the dead is especially apparent in Thomas of Cantimpré’s life of Christina Mirabilis. The vita begins, oddly, with Christina’s
funeral and continues, more oddly still, with her startling reanimation during the requiem mass. Christina subsequently explains
to her sisters that upon her death, angels had led her to view the pains of purgatory and hell, thereafter conducting her
to her ultimate and deserved destination of paradise. So moved was Christina by the sight of such suffering in purgatory,
however, that she asked to return to earth in order to intercede for the souls in purgatory through the excruciating penance
she undertook on their behalf. God agreed—hence her return to life.
¹¹⁸
After her uncanny rejuvenation, Christina was possessed of a spectral quality that literally struck horror in those who beheld
her, “and people could scarcely tell whether a spirit or a material body had passed by, since she barely seemed to touch the
ground.” Appropriately, one of Christina’s many penitential practices entailed entering the graves of the dead.
¹¹⁹

Once returned to life, Christina is cast as an extremely visible proponent of the penitential system, not only urging sinners
to confess and do penance but using her gifts of prophecy to discern unconfessed sins.
¹²⁰
But Christina’s advocacy is particularly engaged by her role as vicarious penitent, while Thomas focuses his account on the
various punishments she endured in this capacity. She crept into ovens; she threw herself into roaring fires; she jumped into
cauldrons of boiling water; she submerged herself in the waters of the Meuse during winter.
¹²¹
Many of the torments that Christina sought out were associated with instruments of penal servitude and torture. She stretched
her limbs on the rack and suspended herself from the gallows. Her friends, although thinking her mad and attempting to restrain
her, succeeded only in prolonging her own efforts: a local doctor chained Christina to a pillar in a dungeon; her sister and
friends bound her to a heavy wooden yoke.
¹²²
Meanwhile, God kept his part of the bargain and released many souls from purgatory as a result of Christina’s exertions.

The very emphasis on purgatory focuses attention on and reifies mechanisms of judgment, which many heretics openly contested.
For instance, a representative inquisitional manual from the mid–thirteenth century suggests that heretics of many different
persuasions were united in their tendency to test orthodox views of the judgment ensuing after death, while some denied the
existence of judgment altogether, arguing salvation for all.
¹²³
This position is further commemorated by heretical testimony in inquisitional records.
¹²⁴
The merciful side of the Beguine mission in purgatory had the effect of softening the harsh contours of a rigid system of
justice that consigned individuals to either heaven or hell. But it would be misleading to construe female interventions as
necessarily entailing a critique of this system, except in rare instances. Caroline Walker Bynum and Barbara Newman have both
identified certain female mystics who theologically challenged the necessity of hell.
¹²⁵
Moreover, in 1231 a woman named Lucardis, “who was reputed to have been of a most saintly life, but who bewailed with dreadful
laments the unjust banishment of Lucifer, whom she wished again restored to heaven,” was burned at the stake in Trier in the
course of the antiheretical purge conducted by Conrad of Marburg (d. 1233).
¹²⁶
But such objections are anomalous. Nor would the women who disavowed judgment have received sponsorship from the theologically
canny James of Vitry or Thomas of Cantimpré. More to their tastes was the sanguine acceptance of divine judgment represented
by Mary of Oignies who, in answer to her earnest prayers about her deceased mother’s fate, learned that the latter had been
damned in hell for having lived off her husband’s usurious earnings without penance. According to Thomas’s
Supplement
:

When the handmaid of Christ had pondered all these things in an orderly way, she blessed God’s just judgement, even in regard
to her mother’s damnation. Nor did she weep any more about her through whom she had received the beginnings of the flesh,
who had now been handed over to everlasting death. The intellectual reason of her soul, which only the Almighty created, was
in harmony with God.
¹²⁷

So impressive was Mary’s resignation that Thomas would return to it again in
Concerning Bees
to counteract the “stupid wonder” (
stultam
admirationem
) of individuals who are surprised that the saints do not grieve over the damned.
¹²⁸

In line with what Paul Strohm has shown in his examination of the intercessory function of queens in secular government, interventions
of most female mystics could be interpreted as essential to oiling systems of justice that otherwise might atrophy through
excessive rigidity. By occasionally yielding to the female supplicatory function, moreover, male justice is permitted to manifest
mercy without incurring the attached stigma of weakness.
¹²⁹
But—as with the ultimate intercessory paradigm, the Virgin Mary—the role these female mystics played in the course of their
interaction with purgatory is in many ways cosmetic: camouflaging the implacability of divine judgment without derailing its
relentless processes.
¹³⁰
Women’s power did not, after all, extend into hell but was limited to purgatory. This “middle place” between heaven and hell
emerged, as Jacques Le Goff has shown, in response to the necessary sinfulness of the burgeoning world of commerce and fittingly
remained the quintessential gray area of negotiation. And, as is well known, visions of purgatory are instantly implicated
in supporting the system of masses for the dead or the inflationary system of indulgences—the worldly underbelly of other-worldliness.
Thus if the experiences of these women summoned the super-natural realm into the world in an unprecedented way, they simultaneously
infused the supernatural with an unprecedented worldliness. Finally, visions of this ilk constitute the most compelling evidence
possible, not simply of the various mechanisms of judgment awaiting the dead, but of the very existence of the afterlife itself.
This remains true even if a particular vision attempts to circumvent the operation of its judicial devices.

Thus the activities of female mystics did more to authorize than to challenge the working of divine justice as well as the
various mechanisms by which it was sustained. In particular, these women could be construed as validating different kinds
of pain. The work of both Caroline Walker Bynum and Barbara Newman has indicated the centrality of women’s pain and suffering
in their negotiations with purgatory. Jo Ann McNamara has further noted that the economy was sufficiently disadvantageous
to women in this period that, although women had historically distinguished themselves as almsgivers, they now had little
else to give besides their vicarious suffering.
¹³¹
But even as these external, often grim, realities acted upon and shaped women’s aptitude for suffering, this aptitude would,
in turn, act upon other external, often grim, realities with an exculpatory or vindicatory effect. Purgatory gave suffering
new meaning by providing a more precise scale, in terms of both costs and benefits, for extraterrestrial penitential suffering.
(And, as the subsequent development of the concept of “treasury of merits” implies, the mercantile metaphors are extremely
apposite in this context.)132Women’s embodied spirituality celebrated the new meaning and scope available to physical suffering
and would, in turn, assist in reconciling Christendom at large to a world where suffering was not just inevitable but desirable.
They did this by offering themselves as object lessons for the different registers, meanings, and uses of suffering.

In the course of these women’s lives and revelations, three zones for suffering are described: earth, purgatory, and hell—here
listed according to a hierarchy of desirability and an inverted hierarchy of permanence. In other words, limited temporal
suffering on earth was represented and theorized as better than limited temporal suffering in purgatory, which, in turn, was
to be greatly preferred to unlimited atemporal suffering in hell. Earthly suffering was also, as we have seen, motivationally
enhanced compared with its otherworldly counterparts: suffering in purgatory or hell was purely personal, while earthly suffering
could be undertaken on behalf of another. Finally, the suffering experienced in purgatory was a cross between expiational
and punitive, while hell was purely punitive, where all hopes for amelioration must terminate. Only the sufferings experienced
on earth had the potential for achieving something entirely different—something implicitly demonstrated throughout the various
vitae, and designated by Thomas toward the end of
Concerning Bees
as purgative probation or testing (
probatio purgativa
). This kind of earthly torment, frequently administered by the devil (albeit with God’s permission), does not so much punish
as test or prove the merit of an already good individual.
¹³³
Such a manner of suffering is not simply a vehicle for salvation but a means of sanctification.

Each register is present in James of Vitry’s life of Mary of Oignies. Her scrupulous perception of herself as a sinner will
lead her to greater expiational heights; her prayer and penitential efforts will, in turn, free souls from purgatory. The
ascetic feats she undertakes on behalf of herself and others were, consequently, a source of torment for the devil, who retaliated
by tempting her to certain excesses in asceticism, particularly with regard to fasting.
¹³⁴
James additionally reports that Mary claimed never to have seen a sickness that she had not wanted for herself. In keeping
with this philosophy, we are told that, when suffering from paralysis, Mary asked a certain devout person to stop praying
for her, as the efficacy of his prayers alleviated her illness, hence interrupting her discipline.
¹³⁵
Although all of these afflictions were, in a sense, heaven-sent, one in particular is singled out as explicitly visited by
God, according with the terms of purgative probation:

Then the good Father subdued his daughter whom he loved with the whip of discipline [
disciplinae flagello subdidit
] so that the limbs of her body were wondrously twisted. . . . Then after a little time the force of the illness abated and
she returned to herself and gave great thanks to God who lashes every son whom He receives [
qui flagellat
omnem filium quem recipit
(Heb. 12.6)] because in her was clearly fulfilled what the apostle said, “When I am weak, then I am the stronger (cf. 2 Cor.
12.10).” After the Lord had proved [
probavit
] his chosen one by this infirmity as if she had been gold in a furnace (Prov.27.21), she was so fully purified and polished
that she obtained fortitude from the Lord in fasts and vigils.

The image of God proving his elect as gold in the furnace, in the context of
probatio purgativa
, will be further explored later. James goes on to say that Mary was often visited by such illnesses if a friend of hers was
beset by temptation. That the immediate agent administering such divinely wrought illnesses was probably the devil is suggested
by the fact that the pain could be routed by the sign of the cross, which an attending cleric would make over the afflicted
part.
¹³⁶

Thus suffering is presented as not simply inescapable but, more important, essential to salvation and divinely willed. Moreover,
temporal and earthly suffering, the best of all possible sufferings, is presented as a positive opportunity. Thomas of Cantimpré’s
writings propel this formulation to the next stage, advancing beyond the mere suggestion that opportunities for earthly suffering
are salvific to the more radical purification of the institutions affording such torments. And this, too, has an antiheretical
salience. Heretical contentions against the reality of divine judgment were extensions of their denial to human institutions—ecclesiastical
and secular—of the right to pass judgment, particularly one resulting in the death sentence. Orthodoxy, in turn, insisted
on the legitimacy of the various machines of justice. Indeed, certain inquisitors will even isolate objections to the death
penalty as a touchstone for heretical beliefs.
¹³⁷
We have already seen that Christina Mirabilis is represented as tortured on racks and suspended from gallows—mechanisms that,
unlike the cross, are invested with a quotidian immediacy. But still more disturbing undercurrents come to the fore in
Concerning Bees
. The brief series of somatic effects in contemporary spirituality discussed above tended to efface certain essential differences:
a man spontaneously dies in the Holy Land from compassion for Christ; a crucifix impresses itself on the bones of a deceased
friar; a woman develops a wound in her side from meditating on Christ’s passion; a Christian captive, who claims to have Christ’s
passion in his heart, is ripped open by a tyrant to establish that this is indeed the case. Thus in the exploration of the
relation between suffering and grace, the boundaries between living and dead or self-imposed and external martyrdom (occurring
as a result of human or divine agency) are tested and ultimately effaced.

A similar kind of conflation occurs in a second series of examples, which professes to demonstrate that an individual is better
off doing penance on earth than waiting to do so in the hereafter. Taking his cue from the seasonal habits of bees, which
seemingly die in the winter only to be revivified in the spring, Thomas draws attention to the lot of the sinner who dies
with sin and is reborn with penance, and then proceeds to illustrate this point.
¹³⁸
The ensuing examples are startling, both in content and in the manner in which they are juxtaposed, ranging widely over disparate
punitive venues. A German count, a contemporary of Emperor Henry VII and a notorious despoiler of the poor, “was seized by
a grave illness by the most merciful divine piety.” Instantly contrite, he restored all of the property he had on hand in
addition to undertaking a vigorous penitential program, despite his infirmities. For instance, he ground his ankles and legs
against the bed frame, tearing apart their very nerves.
¹³⁹
A German thief converted to a life of penance, wherein he afflicted himself with burning wax so that he was “crucified with
an unheard-of suffering.”
¹⁴⁰
A man lost in an Alpine pass comes upon a prostrate knight, bound on the ground, with horrible iron clubs lying on each side
of him. The man admits to being a specter from purgatory visited upon the wayfarer for the latter’s amelioration. In life,
he had been a debauched and murderous participant in the wars between Richard the Lion-Heart and Philip Augustus. Gripped
by a sudden fever, uncontrite and unconfessed, at the moment of death the knight was nevertheless fortunate enough to feel
a strong impulse of contrition. Upon his death, he was instantly handed over to two demons who would torture him with the
iron clubs until the day of judgment.
¹⁴¹
Thus the first three tales progress from self-inflicted punishment in this life to a glimpse of demonic torture in the purgatorial
afterlife. The third episode is miraculously transposed to this world, however, even as the attendant demons are using contemporary
instruments of torture.
¹⁴²