Proving Woman (41 page)

Our third and final instance of potential fraud occurred in Narbonne in 1288. It involves a certain matron named Rixendis,
whose pious claims generated sufficient suspicion to justify an episcopal inquisition. The bishopric was vacant at the time,
so the inquest was conducted by the archbishop’s
officialis
, the canon lawyer Lenterius, in conjunction with the cathedral chapter. Rixendis seems to have initially attracted unfavorable
attention to herself by making a public statement concerning theWaldensians, although the fragmentary nature of the source
gives no clear indication of what this statement might have been. But the major thrust of the inquiry focuses on her visionary
and cultic claims. According to Rixendis’s testimony, eight years had passed since the onset of her raptures. Some of these
ecstasies were of a celestial nature, during which experiences she met with certain heavenly luminaries (Christ, his mother,
and Saint Francis); others involved purgatorial visions, during which she encountered various relatives. She was assured by
her parents of her successful intervention on behalf of many souls in purgatory, an assurance borne out by the gratifying
sight of her parents being admitted into heaven. But their admission occurred only after a brief sojourn at Rixendis’s home,
which seems to have functioned as a halfway house between purgatory and paradise for the many souls Rixendis helped to free.
⁶⁷
In the midst of describing this vision to her judges, Rixendis went into what they took to be a feigned rapture (
fingebat se raptam
) and would no longer answer questions.
⁶⁸
But as the record says, it was time to eat and the inquest was adjourned until the next day.

On the morrow, discoveries about Rixendis came in thick and fast. During one of her raptures, a celestial voice dictated a
letter from Saint John (whether the Baptist or the Evangelist is not clear) containing a set of rather banal requirements:
no fires were to be lit on Sunday, nothing was to be bought or sold, nor was any hot food to be prepared or consumed. According
to the defendant’s testimony, however, a number of women were in attendance at the time of this rapture, all of whom she claims
could likewise testify to having heard the voice. Her rapture also seems to have stimulated considerable commotion in the
heavens, since many lights began to fall from the sky, while a certain star came to rest above her house. When asked whether
she had the capacity to work miracles, Rixendis affirmed that she could, describing how she made the sign of the cross over
a blind woman: the latter’s sight was partially restored so that she could see beds, chests, and open windows with one eye,
and things that were shut with the other.
⁶⁹
Apparently Rixendis had at one point given birth to an illegitimate child. Although asked repeatedly, Rixendis would not reveal
the name of the father: “she said she had confessed this to her confessor, and since the lords who sought and inquired of
her were not her confessors, she was not bound to reveal this to them.” (While technically true, this was hardly a very judicious
answer.) Rixendis further maintained that she had been apprised ahead of time of her summons before the archepiscopal court
by a voice, which urged her to rise up and speak the truth. (Many people were apparently present to hear the voice, which
spoke to Rixendis a number of times, addressing her in the most flattering terms as “Truth,” “Goodness,” and “Sanctity.”)
She was also supernaturally informed that had her persecutors attempted to wrest her forcibly from her bed, not only would
they have been thwarted in their attempts; they would have been damned as a result. Her voluntary rising to answer the inquisitors’
summons, however, would “confirm her in Christ and the martyrs in strength, as much as to her persecutors.”
⁷⁰

At that point the court decided to interrogate the “many women who were said to have had access to Rixendis and to adhere
to the errors of that Rixendis.” But the first witness mentioned is a certain Caihanus, indicating that her following was
by no means exclusively female. Caihanus’s testimony suggests that Rixendis’s pretensions had impinged upon local credulity
in other alarming ways. He relates how, at the request of her followers, Rixendis extended her arms and raised her hands to
bless them. Calling her son, she placed her hands on his head, saying, “Igive thanks for you . . . Be worthy of thanks, and
then saying to those standing around: God yet may do great things through him.”
⁷¹
Caihanus himself asserted that he had become disenchanted with Rixendis and her claims. But he had seen others abase themselves
before her. Even so, Caihanus had assisted in feeding Rixendis, who was weakened in the course of a rapture, dividing her
bread up and helping her to drink through a straw.

Rixendis’s pretensions are a pastiche of the various pious contentions that characterized the women discussed thus far. Her
negotiations in purgatory seem indebted to Beguine spirituality. The celestial letter, which also figured prominently in Magdalena
Beutler’s life, was a common trope among visionaries.
⁷²
The need for assisted feeding suggests that Rixendis likewise experienced long and enervating raptures, as did Elisabeth
of Spalbeek (or as were simulated by the bogus Beguine, Sybil). Caihanus was granted the signal privilege of feeding Rixendis
after her raptures, a favor also extended to a member of Philip of Clairvaux’s retinue with respect to Elisabeth. One also
gleans from other testimony that the two mystics used the same terms of endearment for Christ. Bent over her devotional picture
of the crucifixion, Elisabeth would repeat, “Lord, Sweet Lord,” in her Flemish dialect, for which Philip provides the Latin
(“
Here,
soete Here
, id est,
Domine, dulcis Domine
”). Rixendis would similarly call upon her “Sweet Lord” in a variety of ways in a French dialect (“
Dus
Diaus, Dus Jhesus, Bon Jhesus, Dus Jhesus, etc
.”).
⁷³
Moreover, Rixendis traded on the mystery of her illegitimate son the same way that the followers of Elena d’Oglio or Guglielma
had capitalized on their respective favorite’s mysterious origins. Along with other victims of ecclesiastical inquisitors,
Rixendis assimilated her persecutions with those experienced by Christ and the martyrs. But like the Guglielmites (and perhaps
Guglielma herself), Rixendis aimed high, attempting to establish herself within an exalted soteriological framework. A star
shone over her house, and she alluded to her son’s great destiny, thereby attempting to excite messianic expectations. From
this perspective, the fact that Rixendis arrogated church authority by developing a personal computation of Easter becomes
particularly suggestive.
⁷⁴

And yet in all probability Rixendis was no fraud, differing in this respect from the deliberately self-aggrandizing Sybil.
Rixendis evidently believed her claims. Indeed, the delusional nature of her beliefs ironically attests to her integrity.
Her judges seem gradually to have become aware of these considerations over the course of the inquest. On the first day, the
judges presumed that Rixendis was feigning rapture as a ruse that simultaneously proffered evidence of her mystical gifts
and permitted her to evade questioning. But by the second day, the inquisitors’ attitude necessarily changed: not only had
Rixendis claimed to hear heavenly voices, but she was convinced that others could hear them as well; she thought that she
was instrumental in effecting a cometstorm, while a residual star hovered over her house; she was guileless enough to allege
that the celestial voice addressed her as “Truth,” “Goodness,” and “Sanctity.” At this point, her examiners seem to have decided
that they had heard enough from Rixendis, and quickly reoriented themselves to address matters of damage control, assessing
the full extent of Rixendis’s following. And, in fact, Rixendis may not ultimately have been tried for heresy; rather, her
case is rubricated as “Inquisition on the fanatical Rixendis” (
Inquisitio in
Rixendin fanaticam
), the adjective
fanatica
not only designating religious enthusiasm, but also meaning “furious, mad”—suggestive of mental imbalance. Rixendis’s mental
instability would probably spare her being interrogated and condemned as a heretic. Of course, we have seen that many inquisitors
perceived insanity as a heretical stratagem for evading the stake, and we have heard inquisitors, such as Bernard Gui, complaining
about this ploy.
⁷⁵
But judging from the later line of questioning adopted, the examiners had ample proof that Rixendis was mentally ill.

Yet even if we assume that Rixendis’s putative madness made a difference to her judges, her mental state had not necessarily
registered with her devotees in the same way. They may not have been aware of Rixendis’s assumption that her followers heard
and saw as she did. Or if they did know, it clearly did not make a significant difference to them. In short, if the ability
to establish a following is the marker, the madwoman was every bit as dangerous as the cynical operator, as was an individual
of genuine inspiration.

DISINTEGRATING PROOF: THE PATHOLOGIZATION OF FEMALE SPIRITUALITY

Later, the visual and auditory illusions became much more frequent. . . . The patient was so much preoccupied

with these pathological experiences that he was inaccessible to any other impression and would sit perfectly

rigid and motionless for hours (hallucinatory stupor). . . . His delusional ideas gradually assumed

a mystical and religious character; he was in direct communication with God, he was the plaything of

the devil, he saw “miraculous apparitions,” he heard “holy music,” and in the end he even came to believe that he was living
in another world.

(Sigmund Freud,
Psycho-analytic Notes on an
Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia
[Dementia Paranoides]
)
⁷⁶

The symptoms experienced by the unfortunate German politician Schreber, Freud’s case of
dementia paranoides
, bear some striking similarities to aspects of the medieval mystical union with God. Schreber’s expectations tended to be
more literal, however: he believed that his visions anticipated his metamorphosis into a woman, preparing him for sexual union
with his creator. Yet as idiosyncratic as Schreber’s expectations might be, Freud’s analysis is consistent with a long tradition
of pathologizing mystical experiences that reaches back to the High Middle Ages. Already in the thirteenth century, Rixendis’s
apparent mental instability was an open invitation to the burgeoning diagnostic skills of the period. Corresponding to the
process of canonization’s increased dependency on medical expertise, there was also a progressive awareness that equal care
should be taken over a living person’s claims to supernatural privilege. Moreover, with works like Avicenna’s
Canon of Medicine
or Aristotle’s writings on natural science as standard university fare, theologians had more than a smattering of knowledge
touching medicine and biology that they were only too willing to wield. Thus one of the analogies employed by the anonymous
Franciscan in the course of his argument in favor of the superiority of stigmata to martyrdom was Avicenna’s claim that a
hen who bested a rooster would accordingly grow spurs.
⁷⁷
Interestingly, in the laterMiddle Ages there are numerous instances in which doctors will go on to seek a higher degree in
theology—a phenomenon that peaked in the second half of the fourteenth century—and such individuals were already attending
lectures in theology before completing their medical degree.
⁷⁸
Theology’s diagnostic proclivity would culminate with the flourishing of treatises on spiritual discernment in the later Middle
Ages, discussed in the next chapter. But such efforts were almost immediately apparent with the thirteenth century’s concurrent
rise of both scholasticism and mysticism.

Most theologians were generally prepared to grant that women were more likely than men to be the recipients of supernatural
phenomena such as visions or the stigmata, and assigned solid physiological reasons for this predisposition.According to the
prevailing Galenic theory of humors, women were held to be colder and wetter than men. From a physiological standpoint, the
combination of heat and dryness, which characterized the male, was more highly esteemed. And yet the very qualities that marked
women as physically inferior to men would simultaneously distinguish them as more receptive to supernatural influences. Women’s
greater humidity, and thus greater softness, made them literally and figurativelymore impressionable—a quality that also helped
to explain their heightened imaginative faculty. The power of the female imagination, in conjunction with its impressionability,
is apparent in various theories of conception. It was widely believed that a fetus could resemble aspects of whatever or whomever
the mother had beheld at the time of conception. One popular exemplum even went so far as to allege that a woman was freed
from suspicions of adultery when it was determined that the child resembled the bedspread from the night of conception.
⁸⁰
On a continuum with this view, the thirteenth-century encyclopedist Vincent of Beauvais enlisted Augustine’s provocative suggestion
that love or desire vehemently affects the entire being, likening the potential impact of these emotions to the changes that
occur in the body of a chameleon. Augustine associates the chameleon’s mind-body symbiosis with the mother and fetus—the latter
will naturally absorb the mother’s desires (
libidines
) and fantasies (
phantasia
).
⁸¹
In the richly physical milieu of late medieval spirituality, this doctrine’s potential for naturalizing the supernatural is
immense. Eventually Pietro Pompanazzi (d. 1525), in the course of his discussion on how the activities of the emotions or
the imagination impose themselves on the body, will even raise the possibility of the stigmata’s being naturally imprinted
on a fetus by the meditation of the pregnant mother. As the author is aware, this proposition casts potential doubt not only
on the miraculous nature of how “the passion of our Lord Savior is fashioned in the human hearts” of various women, but even
on the stigmata of Saint Francis.
⁸²