Proving Woman (44 page)

Thus Dorothea’s heightened scrupulosity was not just internalized but seemingly projected onto other women as well—sometimes
in an unsympathetic, even brutal way. This prompted her to look to the clergy to enact stringent disciplinary measures on
both herself and others. One can imagine how this same reflex could trigger still more tangible effects: how the propensity
for confession and accusation of self and others could result in the kind of incrimination that fostered the merging of the
penitential forum with its harsher double, the inquisitional forum against heresy. 148 At this juncture, we should remind
ourselves that, from a theological standpoint, even the confession of an unrepentant heretic was protected by the seal of
confession. In theory, he or she could not be denounced by the confessor. Yet we have also seen how certain canonical authorities,
in particular, Raymond of PeÑafort, believed that a heretic had relinquished the privilege of sacramental secrecy, and that
his confessor should denounce him to the inquisition—a view that, however contested, would remain in circulation owing to
the immense popularity of Raymond’s manual for confessors.
¹⁴⁹
Recall that Dorothea’s confessions were perceived as sufficiently alarming that one of her confessors availed himself of Raymond’s
fiat. But the sacrament’s capacity to incriminate a reformed heretic did not work in reverse. A confessor might, according
to some authorities, betray a penitent’s confession and denounce him to the inquisitors, but his evidence concerning a penitent’s
confession and absolution from heresy would not vindicate a former heretic. Inquisitors were explicitly instructed to disregard
the confessor’s attestations of a penitent’s absolution, perceiving the internal and external fora as discrete tribunals.
Thus according to Zanchino Ugolino, a heresy carries with it a double punishment. Sacramental confession may vindicate you
before God, and spare you the flames of hell, but it does not absolve you before the inquisitional tribunal or help you to
evade its penalties. The power of reconciling heretics belongs to inquisitors and bishops alone.
¹⁵⁰

But female scrupulosity may even have dispensed with the need for clerical denunciations in some instances. Indeed, following
the basic contours of William of Auvergne’s juristic analogy for the sacrament of penance, the perfect penitent was simultaneously
culprit, accuser, arraigner, and prosecutor of him-or herself.
¹⁵¹
Some women, acting in the spirit of Gregory’s “habit of good minds,” seem to have played a proactive role in their own prosecution.
It is worth noting that in the primarily female heresy of the Guglielmites, for example, several women came forward without
being summoned and confessed to the inquisition voluntarily, while none of the men did.
¹⁵²
The testimony of the Na Prous Boneta (d. 1328), a sympathizer with the Beguins and an ardent devotee of Olivi, was seemingly
shaped by the kind of preparation for confession advocated by the clergy, enabling the penitent to “vomit forth her virus”
with ease—as Gerson would have it.
¹⁵³
Her “confession,” proffered without contrition or repentance, however, places her at the crossroads between the well-prepared
penitent and the sacrificial witness at the center of a martyr’s
passio
.
¹⁵⁴

Scrupulosity could also imperil women who were much less culpable. Stephen of Bourbon, a Dominican inquisitor who was active
in France in the 1230s, tells of just such a case concerning a noblewoman in a city where he was conducting heresy trials.
“Holy and innocent, she approached me saying that she offered herself to me for burning as a heretic worse than all the others
who were burned for infidelity, as she was thinking the worst things about the articles of the faith and the sacraments.”
When the woman acknowledged that she never consented to these thoughts, he convinced her that she was innocent, and she left
happy.
¹⁵⁵
There is every reason to believe that the story of this nameless woman depicted not an isolated incident but something of
a type. From this perspective, it is surely significant that Bernard Gui’s inquisitional manual gives a sample sentence for
someone who “incautiously and thoughtlessly” asserted that he or she was a heretic, when, in fact, no heresy could be discerned.
¹⁵⁶
A similar impulse may initially have determined the behavior of Constance of Rabastens (d. after 1386), one of the several
female prophets who, anticipating Joan of Arc, arose during the papal schism. Constance was sufficiently concerned about the
orthodoxy of her revelations that she submitted them to the inquisitor of Languedoc. She was ultimately imprisoned for her
scrupulosity.
¹⁵⁷

An exemplary case from the Fournier register demonstrates how scrupulosity could spin a web of guilt and self-doubt that could
trap and hold a woman in an agonized state of paralysis.
¹⁵⁸
In 1318 Auda, a matron from the diocese of Pamiers, was summoned before inquisitor James Fournier, bishop of the region, under
suspicion of heresy on the basis of her reported words of religious disaffection. Auda’s problems had begun some years earlier
(initially she said eight years before; later on she would emend this to four) when she was about seventeen or eighteen years
of age and newly married. Because of some grave unspecified sin that she had committed before her marriage, she abstained
from communion. When her abstinence aroused her husband’s suspicions, however, she went ahead and received the sacrament anyway,
although “she was altogether terrified and disturbed, because she received the body of Christ without confession of the said
sin.”
¹⁵⁹
After this rash reception, Auda fell into a particular error whereby she could no longer believe that the consecrated bread
and wine constituted the body of Christ. Initially Auda stated that this error had come upon her gradually, crystallizing
a full three years after her pivotal infraction. But later, she again changed her testimony to claim that the error followed
immediately upon her inappropriate participation in the sacrament.
¹⁶⁰
Moreover, while her early testimony maintains that it was the precipitous reception of communion alone that brought on the
crisis, a later emendation states that the immediate cause of her angst occurred when she was on her way to mass and heard
about a woman who, unable to reach shelter, had been forced to give birth in the road. As a result, Auda kept imagining that
the filth of after-birth had infected the body of Christ161—although Auda would later correct herself, denying that she ever
actually thought that the host was infected by such filth, even though this shameful thought surfaced whenever the host was
elevated. Moreover, not only could she no longer believe that the body of Christ was present on the altar; she could not even
look upon it.
¹⁶²

Auda managed to keep her disaffection a secret from everyone, until she fell ill, at which point she told her husband, Guillelmus.
The latter exclaimed, “ ‘Are you in your right senses, cursed woman?’ ” and threatened to send her away unless she confessed.
Auda then summoned her friend Ermengardis, who attempted to comfort the distraught invalid with devotional reassurances and
accounts of eucharistic miracles.
¹⁶³

Under interrogation, Auda’s husband Guillelmus said that he did not consider his wife a heretic but had always thought her
a good Catholic—at least, up until her recent illness when she received communion. Upon being asked why he had not reported
his wife’s error to the bishop or inquisitor (a strangely phrased question, considering they were one and the same), Guillelmus
claimed that his wife said many vain and horrible things during her sickness “just like a man or woman who spoke out of their
minds.” Moreover, she did, at his insistence, confess—hence he believed his reticence justified.
¹⁶⁴

Ermengardis’s testimony basically corroborates the above statements. She adds, however, that, once she knew of Auda’s error,
she literally became sick with fear and, in the course of her infirmity, revealed Auda’s condition to the priest, Guillelmus,
“for the exoneration of Ermengardis, lest [this error] be in any way imputed to her, and she believed that the said priest
revealed the aforesaid things to the said bishop.”
¹⁶⁵
The next person to be questioned was Guillelmus himself, who stipulated that he first learned of Auda’s error in the course
of Ermengardis’s confession. Rather than breaking the seal of confession, however, Guillelmus concocted an ingenious strategy
for evading its strictures. After congratulating Ermengardis for unburdening her conscience to God, Guillelmus urged the expediency
of making some sort of declaration before others. Ermengardis agreed, in essence conceding the necessity of her friend’s being
denounced to the inquisitor. Thereupon Guillelmus summoned four men, including the son of the said Ermengardis, clearly garnering
witnesses who could simultaneously exonerate Ermengardis and incriminate Auda.
¹⁶⁶

But even without Ermengardis’s anxiety over being implicated in heresy by association, or her confessor’s efforts to maneuver
around the seal of confession, Auda’s scrupulosity would doubtless have attracted official notice eventually. For Auda, whose
many emendations of her statement are extremely indicative of her excruciating attention to matters of conscience, was constantly
searching her memory in order to fine-tune her testimony. (There were six emendations in all, two of which occurred on the
same day.) Thus she soon remembered other individuals with whom she had shared her doubts. For instance, Auda had revealed
her concerns to Aladaycis, the nurse hired to attend Auda’s son during her illness, as well as two of the nurse’s friends,
alleging that “she could not believe in God.” The shocked women urged her to return to God.
¹⁶⁷

Bishop Fournier’s diligence proved to be fully equal to the ever expanding ambit of Auda’s scrupulosity. He immediately acted
upon Auda’s new testimony against herself, summoning the three women in question. But their recollection of events differed
from the defendant’s. Aladaycis and her two friends, each of whom was examined individually, all initially denied that Auda
had ever said she did not believe in God, maintaining this position even when “asked often, and still more often, and frequently
. . . examined with care [
interrogata sepe et sepius et frequenter . . . cum
diligentia inquisita
].”
¹⁶⁸
In fact, these women seem to have been attempting to protect Auda. Certainly none of them had been inclined to come forward
and accuse her, even in the oblique manner utilized by Ermengardis. But when Auda was produced from the ecclesiastical prison,
she repeated her testimony and helped the women “bring to mind” (
reducte
ad memoriam
) what had really occurred, and each eventually corroborated Auda’s self-incriminating testimony.
¹⁶⁹
Her efforts to correct her companions’ recollection of events corresponds to her own obsessive concern for detail. But in
the act of correction, Auda also fulfills the traditional role of informant that is not only expected but mandatory for converted
heretics. (And, as Nicolas Eymeric acknowledges, there is no judicial difference between heresy and error; this is clear not
only from the way that Auda is treated procedurally, but also from the corresponding expectation that she denounce all others
somehow implicated in her error.)
¹⁷⁰
As a result of Auda’s testimony, all three of the women were charged with perjury.
¹⁷¹

There were plenty of physiological symptoms that, from a medieval perspective, could be enlisted to explain Auda’s spiritual
disorder. She was delirious in the course of her illness. Afterward, she was given to violent outbursts of despair. Once when
Auda began to cry out and tear at her clothes in the presence of Aladaycis and Guillelma, Auda’s servant, the women assumed
she was having a seizure, since she “was accustomed to suffer then from the falling illness of Saint Paul.” Auda expostulated,
“ ‘Oh, what should I do? for I have lost my mind and rave and cannot appeal to God or the Blessed Virgin Mary!’ ” and she
begged them to go down on their knees and pray to Mary on her behalf, which they immediately did.
¹⁷²
Medieval authorities would probably have assumed that Auda’s epilepsy, in conjunction with her recent illness, produced an
excess of black bile, which, in turn, gave rise to a melancholia that eroded her mental stability.

Whatever one might think about this diagnostic line of reasoning, one factor seems clear: Auda’s restless spirituality bears
the unmistakable stamp of the confessional. Her inner conflict was rooted in an unconfessed sin: the tension between the shame
entailed in confessing and the compulsion to confess undermined her mental health. Her crisis seems to peak, and then abate,
in the course of her trial. Auda’s case is not unique: the unconfessed sin occupies a sizable role in the personal histories
of various famous penitents. Angela of Foligno’s autobiographical account of her conversion begins with an unconfessed sin
and a prayer that she would find a confessor whom she could trust. Both the book and the spiritual odyssey of Margery Kempe
(d. after 1438) begin with the dilemma of a secret sin. When Margery attempted to unburden herself of this long concealed
offense, the confessor reproved her before she had even really begun, and she fell silent, refusing to speak further. Dread
of damnation then drove Margery into a bout of madness that lasted for over eight months. She was eventually cured by Christ
and subsequently gripped by so pressing a need for frequent confession that she sometimes confessed two or three times a day.
¹⁷³
There are also numerous instances in the exemplum tradition in which an unconfessed sin haunts various offenders, who are
invariably depicted as female.
¹⁷⁴
Confessors were aware of this problem. Gerson’s objections to the growing number of reserved sins, those that can be absolved
only by the bishop, are largely grounded in the assumption that female penitents particularly, whether from shyness or fear
of the husband’s detection, would be inclined not to confess such a sin.
¹⁷⁵
In addition, Auda’s continual, and successful, effort toward a more complete recollection of the circumstances surrounding
her error coincides with the kind of cross-examination that a conscientious penitent is expected to practice on him-or herself
in preparation for confession.
¹⁷⁶
Her success in prompting the memories of the other witnesses by bringing to mind (
reducta ad memoriam
) past occurrences corresponds to what the confessor is supposed to do in the event that the penitent is incapable of remembering
his or her sins. In fact,
reducta ad memoriam
is the precise phrase used in John of Freiburg’s influential manual for confessors to describe this process.
¹⁷⁷
And this task, of course, corresponds to the duties of the inquisitor.