Caroline Walker Bynum

Jesus as mother: studies in the spirituality of the High Middle Ages

Preface Abbreviations Introduction I. The Spirituality of Regular Canons in the Twelfth Century II. The Cistercian Conception of Community III. Did the Twelfth Century Discover the Individual? IV. Jesus as Mother and Abbot as Mother: Some Themes in Twelfth-Century Cistercian Writing V. Women Mystics in the Thirteenth Century: The Case of the Nuns of Helfta Epilogue Appendix: Monastic and Canonical Treatises of Practical Spiritual Advice General Index Index of Secondary Authors

Did the Twelfth Century Discover the Individual

Did the twelfth century discover the individual? For a number of years now medievalists have claimed that it did. Indeed, over the past fifty years, in what Wallace Ferguson calls ‘the revolt of the medievalists’, scholars have claimed for the twelfth century many of the characteristics once given to the fifteenth century by Michelet and Burckhardt. As a result, standard textbook accounts now attribute to the twelfth century some or all of the following: ‘humanism’, both in the narrow sense of study of the Latin literary classics and in the broader sense of an emphasis on human dignity, virtue and efficacy; ‘renaissance’, both in the sense of revival of forms and ideas from the past (classical and patristic) and in the sense of consciousness of rebirth, and historical perspective; ‘the discovery of nature and man’, both in the sense of an emphasis on the cosmos and human nature as entities with laws governing their behaviour and in the sense of a new interest in the particular, seen especially in the ‘naturalism’ of the visual arts around the year 1200. In the past fifteen years, however, claims for the twelfth century have increasingly been claims for the discovery of ‘the individual’, who crops up–with his attendant characteristic ‘individuality’—in many recent titles. In the area of political theory, Walter Ullmann has seen the individual emerging in the shift from subject to citizen. Peter Dronke, Robert Hanning and other literary critics have argued for the emergence of the individual both as author and as hero of twelfth-century poetry and romance. And, in the area of religious thought, R. W. Southern, Colin Morris and John Benton have called to our attention a new concern with self-discovery and psychological self-examination, an increased sensitivity to the boundary between self and other and an optimism about the capacity of the individual for achievement.

Fast, Feast, and Flesh: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women

SCHOLARS HAVE RECENTLY devoted much attention to the spirituality of the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries. In studying late medieval spirituality they have concentrated on the ideals of chastity and powerty-that is, on the renunciation, for religious reasons, of sex and family, money and property. It may be, however, that modern scholarship has focused so tenaciously on sex and money because sex and money are such crucial symbols and sources of power in our own culture. Whatever the motives, modern scholars have ignored a religious symbol that had tremendous force in the lives of medieval Christians. They have ignored the religious significance of food. Yet, when we look at what medieval people themselves wrote, we find that they often spoke of gluttony as the major form of lust, of fasting as the most painful renunciation, and of eating as the most basic and literal way of encountering God. Theologians and spiritual directors front the early church to the sixteenth century reminded penitents that sin had entered the world when Eve ate the forbidden fruit and that salvation comes when Christians eat their God in the ritual of the communion table.3 In the Europe of the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, famine was on the increase again, after several centuries of agricultural growth and relative plenty. Vicious stories of food hoarding, of cannibalism, of infanticide, or of ill adolescents left to die when they could no longer do agricultural labor sometimes

Jesus as Mother and Abbot as Mother: Some Themes in Twelfth-Century Cistercian Writing

A number of scholars in this century have noticed the image of God or Jesus as mother in the spiritual writings of the high Middle Ages. The image has in general been seen as part of a “feminine” or “affective” spirituality, and neither of these adjectives is incorrect. The idea of God as mother is part of a widespread use, in twelfth-century spiritual writing, of woman, mother, characteristics agreed to be “feminine,”and the sexual union of male and female as images to express spiritual truths; the most familiar manifestation of this interest in the “female” is the new emphasis on the Virgin in doctrinal discussions and especially spirituality. And the frequency of references to “mother Jesus” is also part of a new tendency in twelfth-century writing to use human relationships (friendship, fatherhood or motherhood, erotic love) in addition to metaphysical or psychological entities to explain doctrinal positions or exhort to spiritual growth.

The Presence of Objects: Medieval Anti-Judaism in Modern Germany

On the southwest corner of a large brick Gothic church in the little town of Sternberg in north Germany is a curious stone. Mortared into the wall of a chapel that juts out beside what was once the main portal of the church, the stone bears, deeply embedded in it, large prints of two bare feet, on the edges of which chisel marks are visible. A xeroxed church guide, available on a table inside the porch, mentions it only briefly, explaining that the stone, which was incorporated into the wall in 1496, is one on which the wife of the Jew Eleazar is said to have stood when she tried to sink a desecrated host in the nearby creek. Unable to cast away the host, she supposedly sank into the stone (fig. 1). Located in the green and beautiful Mecklenburg landscape, Sternberg, like most areas of the former German Democratic Republic (GDR), is now suffering from massive unemployment and the flight of its youth to the west and to urban areas.1 Its train station is closed; even local buses run there only on weekdays. Yet in the early sixteenth century, it was a prominent enough pilgrimage site to be

The Sacrality of Things: An Inquiry into Divine Materiality in the Christian Middle Ages

Students of comparative religion, cognitive scientists, art historians, and historians sometimes use paradigms from non-western religions to raise questions about the role of material objects in Christianity. Recently, such discussion has focused on images and controversies about them. This article argues that the most important material manifestation of the holy in the western European Middle Ages was the Eucharist and suggests both that understanding it is enhanced by the use of comparative material and that considering it as a case study of divine materiality leads to a more sophisticated formulation of comparative paradigms.

Crowned with Many Crowns Nuns and Their Statues in Late-Medieval Wienhausen

The crowning of statues was a common practice in medieval cloisters, but at the north German convent of Wienhausen, the golden crowns of statues were confiscated by Observant reformers after the reformation of 1469. The nuns voiced distress at the loss of these crowns and made new Marian statues with elegant wooden crowns that were irremovable. The author puts the crowns worn by Mary in the context of the crowns worn by the nuns themselves and argues that such elaborate headdresses carried for the sisters many meanings; they include shaping female identity, signaling monastic commitment, and foreshadowing the rewards of heaven.

Avoiding the Tyranny of Morphology; or, Why Compare?

I am a student of Christianity in the twelfth to fifteenth centuries whose recent scholarly work has focused on northern Germany. But I spent five weeks in India in fall 2009, hoping to immerse myself as far as possible in Hindu religious culture. As a medievalist, I expected some comparisons to the European Middle Ages to emerge. Two years later, while I was discussing this with a distinguished historian of modern Europe, she suddenly turned to me and asked: “What do you get out of this? I don’t understand what you’re learning about the Western Middle Ages that you didn’t already know.” That turns out to be a profound question. It challenged me to think harder than I had done before about making comparisons. This article is an effort to provide a provisional and partly autobiographical answer to the question, what do scholars of religion dowhen they compare things, and why do they do it? In 1928 at the Sixth International Congress of Historical Sciences, the medievalist Marc Bloch made a plea for comparative history. But as John Elliott has pointed out recently in his elegant little book History in the Mak-

Encounter: Holy beds

I first encountered the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s beguine cradle in 1960, when I was a junior at the University of Michigan and went to Detroit to see the highly touted exhibition “Flanders in the Fifteenth Century: Art and Civilization.” Although I had visited the medieval collection at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, this was the first special exhibit devoted to the art of the Middle Ages I had ever seen. Because my trip to Detroit occurred fifty-six years ago, I can be forgiven, I think, for having only a vague memory of this encounter. I remember wondering why a doll’s bed, even one for the baby Jesus, figured in such a show, but, like the curators themselves, I was interested primarily in the paintings, especially those of Rogier van der Weyden, Jan van Eyck, and Hieronymus Bosch. In contrast, when I take students to the Met today, encounter with the beguine cradle is one of the high points of the tour (Fig. 1). The questions it raises now bear almost no relation to what curators and viewers experienced in 1960, when the crib visited Detroit, and it draws me and my students to another, much less-studied crib that is displayed quite close to the beguine cradle. The difference between what I and others thought we saw in 1960 and what we see today provides a window onto changes in the field of art history over the past half century. The catalogue for the Detroit exhibit was organized, like the exhibit itself, according to medium or some sort of understanding of type, with “paintings” the largest group by far.1 Next in numerical importance came “sculpture,” which seems to have meant carvings in wood, for the categories “metalwork” and “goldsmith’s work” included figures we would today call sculpture. The beguine cradle was located in “furniture.” The category of “devotional object,” which was put on the art historical map in a way that fired popular imagination by Henk van Os in the exhibit “The Art of Devotion” in Amsterdam in 1994–95, was in no way thought of.2 Throughout the Detroit catalogue, material trumps use or form as a principle of organization. But the matter described is not the matter of the recent “material turn” or “thing theory.” It is acted upon, not actor, not even a participant in its own shaping. It is striking to read, from this distance, the description in the Detroit catalogue of the cradle itself. The entry opens by relating it to cribs for actual babies in the fifteenth century and cites a surviving cradle perhaps used by the house of Burgundy. Although the Grand Béguinage in Louvain is mentioned as the provenance, there is no explanation of who the religious women known as beguines were, although we are given details about the musical instruments played by the angels on the bedposts. The only specific reference to women is the note that cribs were “sometimes given to nuns at the time they took their vows.”3 Such—to put it a little baldly—were the days before women’s history!4 But today, the significance for women is the first question my students raise. And pointing them toward answers is easy, however confusing the answers themselves may be. Since the 1980s we have had the work of Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, Ulinka Rublack, Jeffrey Hamburger, Thomas Lentes, Peter Keller, and Amy Powell, among others, who have explored the lives of religious women through the study of devotional objects, sometimes placing the extraordinary prominence of such objects and the visions they often

The Women's March: New York, January 21, 2017

Written two days after the womens march in New York on January 21, 2017, this essay—a guest column in Common Knowledge —describes the event and emphasizes two aspects: its multi-issue focus and its response to the denigration of womens expertise represented in much of the hostility to Hillary Clintons candidacy. Comparing the widespread resistance to Donald Trumps proposals in early 2017 with recent single-issue protests, the author suggests that it is a strength of the current moment that women confront a wide range of issues, from sexual harassment to gun violence to reproductive choice to immigration restriction. She also argues that a pernicious and often unrecognized denigration of female voices and female expertise forms an undercurrent of contemporary political debate that needs to be much more widely resisted. She writes out of forty years of personal experience with womens issues, hoping that the progress made earlier will continue but predicting an uphill battle.