Proving Woman (42 page)

But the conditions facilitating the spiritual benefits associated with female physiology were inseparable from attendant dangers.
This was already clear in the writings of William of Auvergne (d. 1249), the first scholastic to treat the spiritual ramifications
of physiology extensively and, thus, a mainstay for future theologians with a diagnostic bent.83 William believed that a person’s
humoral makeup—that is to say, complexion—informed his or her spiritual aptitude. Certain complexions actually engorge the
soul, impeding its higher powers. Thus he cites Galen as saying that the phlegmatic complexion was particularly unspiritual.
Following Aristotle,William maintains that a person possessed of a melancholic complexion was generally considered to be more
intelligent and naturally predisposed to the kind of contemplation that could lend itself to mystical rapture.84Women, considered
intellectually inferior to men, were unlikely candidates for a genuinely melancholic complexion, while their cool wetness
would recommend them as potential phlegmatics.
⁸⁵
Nevertheless, other aspects of their physiology made them prone to both mystical rapture and conditions that could masquerade
as such.86William’s disparagement of certain superstitious beliefs perpetuated by old women, for example, takes the following
turn:

You ought, however, to know about these things which you heard, that many of these visions and fantastic apparitions are produced
in many people by the illness of melancholia. This is especially true with women, just as is the case with true visions and
revelations. And the reason is, in addition to what the doctors say, the nature of female souls—namely, from the fact that
they are far easier of impression than male souls.
⁸⁷

Thus in contradistinction to a genuinely melancholic complexion, the disease of melancholia to which William alludes resulted
from a humoral imbalance, in particular an excess of black bile, which could, in turn, give rise to counterfeit raptures.
⁸⁸
William, however, confuses the matter still more when he cites Galen as witness to the way that certain individuals, from
the vehemence of their devotions and their ardent desire to enjoy the beauty of God, will develop melancholia. The symptoms
are especially deceptive in that, at least initially, someone afflicted with melancholia will experience great illuminations.
All too soon, however, that light is dramatically shut off as corrupted vapors reach the mind, provoking alienation and delirium.
⁸⁹
Moreover, according to theorists like Albert the Great (d.1280), female humidity results in a more “mobile” complexion, which
not only hampers the intellect but fosters mutability and a desire for novelty.
⁹⁰
This kind of physiological fault would tend to make women all the more eager for, and credulous of, outlandish otherworldly
experiences.

Finally, there is that peculiarly female disease known as the suffocation of the uterus, or hysteria, wherein the absence
of sex permits corrupted humors to build up so that the womb actually rises and presses against the heart.
⁹¹
This condition could also, in turn, induce a kind of abstraction. The Pseudo-Albert the Great’s
On the Secrets of Women
relates how Galen cured one woman who, judging from her total immovability, which seemed to include a loss of pulse, was given
up for dead.
⁹²
One of the commentators on this text draws explicit parallels with suspect spirituality:

Women who suffer this illness lie down as if they were dead. Old women who have recovered from it say that it was caused by
an ecstasy during which they were snatched out of their bodies and borne to heaven or to hell, but this is ridiculous. The
illness happens from natural causes, however they think that they have been snatched out of their bodies because vapors rise
to the brain. If these vapors are very thick and cloudy, it appears to them that they are in hell and they see black demons;
if the vapors are light, it seems to them that they are in heaven and that they see God and his angels shining brightly.
⁹³

Even Thomas of Cantimpré, no mean skeptic about the supernatural origin of trances or the efficacy of female mysticism, states
that “this disease especially occurs with widows, and whenever this occurs they fall [to the ground] just as with heart disease.”
⁹⁴

With respect to positive spiritual potential, women’s heightened powers of imagination were likewise beset with an ambivalence
that parallels the advantages and disadvantages of the female physiology generally. On the one hand, a heightened imagination
was undoubtedly an advantage from the point of view of contemporary spirituality and its emphasis on visualizing key events
in Christ’s life. Most of the female mystics of the period received their revelations through the medium of spiritual vision,
which relied on mental images derived from the imagination.
⁹⁵
On the other hand, the imagination itself drew upon corporeal vision for its images; thus it was the mental faculty that was
most likely to be tainted by contact with the senses.
⁹⁶
Indeed, a number of authorities perceived the imagination to be as much a physical power as a mental one.
⁹⁷
Moreover, the imagination itself was the part of the mind that was particularly susceptible to demonic vitiation. Hence Vincent
of Beauvais describes the manner in which demons can penetrate the imagination, riding the crest of the humors and impressing
various fallacious images therein.
⁹⁸

Demons also held sway over the passions, a term that in the Middle Ages designated an emotional state produced by a combined
set of psychological and corporeal factors that would, in turn, render solid physiological consequences.
⁹⁹
William of Auvergne gives a detailed description of how the devil, pressing himself on a certain organ, produces a passion
so powerful that physical seizures can follow, and excoriates certain medical experts who assign a purely physical origin
to such disorders. He relays compelling delusions that can ensue as a result of such diabolical pressures. One man believed
himself to be a rooster and spoke in what he took to be a rooster voice. Another thought himself a bird each time one flew
by. This latter delusion possessed no particular monopoly, however, since on other occasions the individual in question alternately
believed he was the son of God, the Holy Spirit, the son of the devil, and the Antichrist. William also knew a woman “who
believed herself to be known from inside by the devil and she said that she felt other scarcely credible things.” Demonic
pressure on one man’s imaginative organ resulted in a complete stupor, during which the unconscious man was convinced he was
a wolf ravaging the countryside. (It did not help matters that the devil actually produced a wolf that did ravage the countryside,
which the deluded man perceived as corroborating evidence of the harm he had wrought during his metamorphosis.)
¹⁰⁰

Certain passions, particularly fleshly concupiscence, existed in opposition to the spiritual life and thus forestalled mystical
rapture.
¹⁰¹
And yet even such antithetical conditions produced symptoms that were open to misinterpretation. Extreme carnal love, for
example, was believed to induce a complete abstraction from the senses—symptomatic of the famous medieval lovesickness, a
condition associated with melancholia.
¹⁰²
More-in over, a widely held understanding of mystical rapture is that the soul is literally seized by divine love.
¹⁰³
William of Auvergne would contend, however, that this overinvestment in carnal desire results in the opposite of mystical
rapture.
¹⁰⁴
Even so, viewed from the outside, the two conditions were indistinguishable.

Illness, madness, or brain damage could also simulate a rapturelike state.
¹⁰⁵
A certain good and religious man told William of Auvergne how, in the course of an illness, he was convinced that he saw great
towers with black men ascending them. William is further aware of how the devil might capitalize on the delirium ensuing from
such illness, tampering with the imagination and producing delusions of grandeur.
¹⁰⁶
Sometimes people in the grip of an illness can temporarily speak with such sublimity that they appear prophetic. Eventually,
however, the telltale fumes would rise to the brain and the momentary lucidity would devolve into ridiculous babble. According
to Vincent of Beauvais, the soul of a sick person, when in a state of abstraction from the body, continues restlessly to manufacture
images. The invalid is incapable of discerning between the images apprehended by the corporeal eye and those present to spiritual
vision. In other words, the imaginary is mistaken for the real and vice versa. But the devil can also produce these same effects
in individuals who are otherwise healthy, giving rise to demoniacs and false prophets.
¹⁰⁷

The above discussion certainly problematizes the illnesses that were so frequently employed to prove female sanctity, since
any number of symptoms of ill-health could undermine the different order of proof required for the authentication of a rapture.
For instance, James of Vitry mentions in passing the fact that Mary of Oignies’s weak heart permitted her to fall into an
ecstasy at a mere mention of the passion. Caesarius of

Heisterbach relates that Elisabeth of Scho ö nau usually suffered from heart trouble (
passionem cordis
) but would be relieved of her pain in the course of an ecstasy.
¹⁰⁸
In the early thirteenth century, such assertions seemed largely unproblematical ways of authenticating divine favor. Indeed,
the rubric for Caesarius’s exemplum concerning Elisabeth is “Contemplation exceeding reason is in a certain way the death
of the flesh”—hence the story was used to demonstrate the miraculous death-in-life condition of rapture. If assessed according
to the progressively medicalized standard of the later Middle Ages, however, Caesarius’s miraculous proof worked to precisely
the opposite effect, tending to naturalize the marvel in question. An appreciation of the tension between these different
criteria helps to contextualize the line of questioning pursued in Clare of Montefalco’s process of canonization. After testifying
to Clare’s raptures, various nuns in the community were immediately asked whether Clare suffered from any gynecological problems
(
de infirmitate matricis
), heart condition, or epilepsy—all of which could provoke the kind of unconscious state that might be mistaken for rapture.
Fortunately, Clare had never been prone to these particular ailments.
¹⁰⁹
As the Middle Ages progressed, ecclesiastical authorities became increasingly sensitive to the dangers of physiologically
induced pseudoraptures, and the fortunes of female spirituality would dwindle proportionately. Indeed, later writers, such
as John Nider and Bernard Basin, demonstrate that such physiological considerations prepared the way for a gendered explanation
of witchcraft.
¹¹⁰

CONFESSION, “THE HABIT OF GOOD MINDS,”

AND THE RISE OF SCRUPULOSITY

It is the habit of good minds to see a fault

where there is none.

(Gregory the Great)

Who doubts in faith is an infidel.

(Raymond of PeÑafort)
¹¹¹

Of course, the surest way to secure one’s mystical experiences against the whims of the pathologizing clergy was still to
retain one’s own interpretive strategist—usually a confessor, the more highly placed the better. Indeed, women’s scrupulous
confessional practices, reified by their ongoing dependence on the confessional relationship, cast deviations into sharp relief,
again indicating the uncomfortable proximity of the different confessional fora. Consider, for example, the well-known case
of the mystic Marguerite Porete. Her indifference to presenting herself in the context of some recognizable confessional relationship—whether
in terms of a stable confessional practice or of a confessor to vet and record her revelations—ultimately meant that she would
end up at a different confessional locus altogether: an inquisitional tribunal. The cleric Guiard de Cressonessart attempted
to defend Marguerite before this dire forum, thus providing her with some clerical cover. But there is no mention of her welcoming
his overtures: it is doubtful that she had even met him before.
¹¹²

And yet a rising pastoral discourse would again appeal to medicine in order to undermine the efficacy of women’s confessional
practices, this erstwhile bastion of female exemplarity, hence eroding the relationship on which women depended not only for
spiritual nourishment but often for physical safety. Certain ecclesiastical authorities gradually came to believe it possible
for an overexacting penitent to sink too deeply into the sacrament, inadvertently crossing a subtle barrier beyond which a
virtue is deformed into a vice. We can already see the potential for this type of mutation in the thirteenth century, when
theologians, such as Aquinas, will apply themselves to Gregory the Great’s characterization of the “habit of good minds to
recognize a sin where there is none” by asking whether someone could go so far as to confess a sin that he or she had not
really committed, concluding that this was impermissible.
¹¹³
John Gerson (d. 1429), chancellor of the University of Paris and one of the most important voices in the pastoral theology
of his day, will extend and deepen this problematization of confessional practice under the rubric of scrupulosity or pusillanimity.
¹¹⁴

Gerson’s general approach to spiritual dispositions is encapsulated in a statement he attributes to Plato: “Souls follow bodies”—a
tendency that Gerson saw as not invariable but definitely indicative of a certain inclination. Here the blood was the medium
through which psychological and spiritual inclinations were fashioned and transmitted.
¹¹⁵
Gerson’s discussion of scrupulosity is grounded in the premise that fear is a passion, and that someone predisposed to this
passion is especially prone to suffer from scrupulosity of conscience.
¹¹⁶
Complexion was a further contributing factor. If a person had thin, cold blood, and his or her natural moisture was dominated
by phlegmatic humors—characteristics that were thought to be typical of women—that individual would be prone to fear and pusillanimity,
responses that were frequently associated with a weakness of the heart.
¹¹⁷
And these complexional traits were open to demonic exploitation. Indeed, both good and bad angels are capable of penetrating
the lower, sensual part of the soul, thus affecting both the senses and the sensual appetites.118With God’s permission, the
devil can take advantage of the timid person’s defective nature by incubating the passion of fear in the senses. People who
are particularly afflicted might become stupefied with fear, break out in cold sweats, or fall to the ground as if mad. More-over,
if these hapless individuals permit themselves to be overcome by this fear even once or twice, chances are that they will
never be cured—a truth to which physicians themselves will attest, or so Gerson maintains.
¹¹⁹
Such fear should thus be fled rather than embraced.
¹²⁰