Barbara Newman

Hildegard of Bingen: Visions and Validation

Some years ago, wrote the Flemish monk Guibert to his friend Radulfus, strange and incredible rumors reached his ears at the Benedictine monastery of Gembloux. They concerned an old woman, abbess of the Benedictine foundation at Bingen-am-Rhein, who had gained such fame that multitudes flocked to her convent, from curiosity or devotion, to seek her prophecies and prayers. All who returned thence astonished their hearers, but none could give a plausible account of the woman, save only that her soul was “said to be illumined by an invisible splendor known to her alone.” Finally he, Guibert, impatient with rumor and zealous for the truth, resolved to find out for himself. In the year 1175 he wrote to this famed seer, Hildegard, with mingled curiosity and awe. Surely she had received “rare gifts, till now practically unheard of throughout all ages”; in prophecy she excelled Miriam, Deborah, and Judith; but let her recall that great trees are uprooted sooner than reeds, and let her keep herself humble.

Charles Williams and the Companions of the Co-inherence

This article assesses the legacy of Charles Williams as an esoteric Christian teacher. Best known as a friend of C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien, Williams was also a prolific writer, a practicing Rosicrucian, and a lay spiritual director. Focusing on his central doctrine of co-inherence and corresponding prayer technique known as “substituted love,” the essay examines his novels, poetry, and theological writings as well as his practice of spiritual direction, asking how his ideas were influenced by his familiarity with ritual magic. It also explores the informal religious order he founded, the Companions of the Co-inherence.

The Passion of the Jews of Prague: The Pogrom of 1389 and the Lessons of a Medieval Parody

Outbreaks of anti-Jewish violence in late medieval cities were hardly rare. For that reason, among others, surviving records are often frustratingly brief and formulaic. Yet, in the case of the pogrom that devastated Pragues Jewish community on Easter 1389, we have an extraordinary source that has yet to receive a close reading. This account, supplementing numerous chronicle entries and a Hebrew poem of lament, is the Passio Iudeorum Pragensium , or Passion of the Jews of Prague —a polished literary text that parodies the gospel of Christs Passion to celebrate the atrocity. In this article I will first reconstruct the history, background, and aftermath of the pogrom as far as possible, then interrogate the Passio as a scriptural and liturgical parody, for it has a great deal to teach us about the inner workings of medieval anti-Judaism. By “parody” I mean not a humorous work, but a virtuosic pastiche of authoritative texts, such as the Gospels and the Easter liturgy, that would have been known by heart to much of the intended audience. We may like to think of religious parodies as “daring” or “audacious,” seeing in them a progressive ideological force that challenges corrupt institutions, ridicules absurd beliefs, and pokes holes in the pious and the pompous. But The Passion of the Jews of Prague shows that this was by no means always the case.

Redeeming the Time: Langland, Julian, and the Art of Lifelong Revision

This essay compares Piers Plowman and Julian’s Revelation of Love with respect to literary form, authorial process, and temporality. It argues that the structural messiness of both works is deliberate, signifying an aesthetics of process linked to an atypical refusal to separate privileged from ordinary consciousness; a creative use of typology not only to contrast disparate temporal moments, but also to collapse them; and a process of lifelong revision that denied existential as well as formal closure. Positing a ‘B text’ drafted by Julian between A Vision and A Revelation, the essay compares the aesthetic effects of her final revisions with those created in the course of Langland’s development from B to C.

The heretic saint: Guglielma of Bohemia, Milan, and Brunate

High above Lake Como in Lombardy, overlooking the cathedral city of Como and the southwestern branch of the lake, looms the tiny village of Brunate. It is a picturesque spot, beloved of mountain climbers, which enjoyed a brief heyday as a tourist mecca in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. An efficient if ear-popping funicular railway, inaugurated in 1894, now scales the steep cliff in a brisk seven minutes. But in the Middle Ages, when most of our story is set, Brunate was as remote and inaccessible a site as one could hope to find. A hagiographer around 1600 described it as an “ignoble village on that mountain whose vast ridge towers above the city to the east.… The mountain is arduous and laborious to climb.” In 1578 the village had a mere 156 inhabitants, and as late as 1900 its year-round population was barely over 500.

Annihilation and authorship: Three women mystics of the 1290s

One of the most startling tenets of late-medieval mysticism is its call for selfannihilation. The human soul, with all its powers of knowing, willing, and loving, must be reduced to nothing and merge into God without remainder, sacrificing its unique identity in indistinct union with the Beloved. On the face of it, the quest for annihilation—a Christian version of nirvana—seems to represent the epitome of disillusionment with the present life. Nothing in this world is worth saving, for salvation merely reverses the gratuitous act of creation. As one fourteenthcentury mystic put it, the naked soul must return to the naked Godhead, “where I was before I was created.”1 Yet mystical annihilation proves to be a complex idea, with significant variants across the range of late-medieval spirituality. Although the concept became widespread only in the calamitous fourteenth century, it first emerged in the relatively calm 1290s. More remarkably, it emerged simultaneously in the writings of three women who lived far apart and could not possibly have known of each other. Three great works of women’s mysticism came into being in this decade and all profess the new doctrine, though in different ways and to differing degrees. Mechthild of Hackeborn, Angela of Foligno, and Marguerite Porete were exact contemporaries who differed in language, social status, and modes of religious life; their books diverge no less in genre, modes of production, and posthumous destinies. Thus comparing them can provide a way to contextualize the radical idea of annihilatio, which Bernard McGinn links expressly with women, as it took shape within the varied contexts of their authorship.2 Yet a soul’s desire for annihilation is on some level deeply opposed to a desire for authorship, which can preserve the trace of an individual self for all time. So this article asks two interrelated questions. First, what are the roots of mystical annihilation? Where does this new concept come from, and how does it coalesce in the writings of these very different women? Second, how do they negotiate the conflict, already voiced by Saint Paul, between a pastoral desire to teach and a mystical “desire to be

The Mirror and the Rose: Marguerite Porete's Encounter with the Dieu d'Amours

Several years ago I proposed the new term mystique courtoise to categorize an array of vernacular mystical texts from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, especially but not solely those written by beguines.1 The concept of mystique courtoise is meant to distinguish traditional forms of spiritual writing that drew on the lush imagery of the Song of Songs to characterize divine love, as Christian mystics had done ever since Origen, from a newer literary/religious mode that self-consciously inflected this tradition with the vernacular language of fine amour, adapted from secular lyrics and romances.

Charles Williams: The Third Inkling by Grevel Lindop (review)

287 sees in Levertov’s poetics a similar attitude to what we encountered in Bremond, that is, while both mystic and poet desire transformation through the practice of their art, in the case of the former it is a transformation of self, whereas for the latter it is the transformation of the poetry itself. According to Greene, Levertov came to view “poem-making [as] a religious act . . . an ‘enfaithed [activity that . . . involved a process which strengthened the capacities for prayer, especially for paying attention, for receptivity and for imagining, enabling one to enter into and honour the mystery” (237). To conclude, I draw from Francesca Bugliani Knox’s introduction to this collection of articles. She rightly maintains that included within the works of these fine scholars are the “theological, philosophical, and literary reflections on the continuities and discontinuities of poetry and prayer together with examples of the extent to which poetry and prayer converge (12). Taken together, I recommend this collection of articles for two publics: for scholars interested in and challenged by the nexus of poetry and prayer in terms of origins, practice, and transformation; and, for non-academics who either write poetry with an eye to transformation or pray with poetry as a pathway toward transcendence. “The Power of the Word” continues as an open-ended series of conferences (the next is scheduled for 2017), a series of volumes (the third due out soon), and, most importantly, as an open invitation to all to reflect upon, compose, and pray with poetry.

Lessons from the vineyard: On the pedagogy of prayer

How would you like to be an anthropologist in a medieval convent? Let’s say at the Rupertsberg, where Mistress Hildegard receives a celestial vision every week—or Unterlinden, where the sisters scourge themselves in concert to delight God’s ears? I often think that our work is not unlike historical anthropology. Alas, we cannot interview our informants or observe them with our own eyes and ears. But if we have rich textual sources and a decent knowledge of history, practicing a hermeneutics of empathy is a bit like being a participant observer. We can at least imagine how it would feel to believe as people once did, behave as they did, and share their fears and desires. Yet, no matter how fully we immerse ourselves in an imagined world of the past, we cannot help knowing that our experience is, in fact, imagination. So our immersion is necessarily self-limiting; we can never truly “go native.” The real participant observer walks a fine line between empathetic belonging and critical distance, engagement in an exotic subculture and allegiance to intellectual values that stand outside that culture. So, in a review of Tanya Luhrmann’s masterpiece of religious ethnography, When God Talks Back, Bruce Hindmarsh asks, “What kind of ‘theory of mind’ is necessary to account for the way one must split one’s mind in half to enter into religious rituals genuinely, doing the Ignatian exercises and the Alpha course, while still holding back another part of the mind, behind a social scientific firewall, to engage in analysis, critique, and theorizing?”1 This is not a bad description of what some of us

Contemplating the Trinity: Text, Image, and the Origins of the Rothschild Canticles

This article revisits the Rothschild Canticles, specifically the Trinity cycle, through a close study of the Latin text. It identifies previously unknown sources, demonstrating the compiler’s wide frame of reference and confirming that the most recent texts date from the 1290s. Further, it argues that the Trinity painter developed a vocabulary of apophatic literalism to give visual form even to such unlikely statements as “Truly you are a hidden God” and “My center is everywhere, my circumference nowhere.” The intimate link between text and miniatures suggests that the designer of these paintings was a seasoned contemplative, almost certainly a monk. In its second section, the article considers the collaboration of compiler, artist, and scribe, proposing that the compiler himself designed the miniatures, although they were executed by a professional artist from Saint-Omer. Another perplexing feature lies in the scribe’s carelessness and failure to understand the material. The essay asks why and where such a sophisticated painter would have collaborated with a minimally competent scribe. Finally, it turns to one extremely rare text, tracing it to a hagiographic work by the eleventh-century monk Drogo, unknown outside his abbey of Bergues-Saint-Winnoc. On this ground it argues that the compiler was a monk of Saint-Winnoc, where the manuscript was produced—possibly for a canoness at the local abbey of Saint-Victor. That Bergues was not known at this time for professional book production could explain the inexpert scribal work. A postscript seeks to identify the coat of arms on fol. 1.