Crying in the Middle Ages

Gertsman, Elina

doi:10.4324/9780203807750

Cited by 48 publications

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“… The association was rooted in medical theory, according to which the female body was cold and wet, and therefore needed to expel moisture. It was reinforced by the popularity of the cults of weeping women, especially the Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene, and by the lachrymose devotions of pious women. It is thus unsurprising that the weeping of holy men has often been seen as an effeminate trait, and as symptomatic of the medieval tendency to feminize the bodies of Christ and of the male saint.…”

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Episcopal emotions: tears in the life of the medieval bishop

Harvey

2014

Hist Res

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This article explores the significance of weeping in the lives of late medieval English bishops (c.1100−c.1400). It considers the lachrymose devotions of saintly bishops alongside tears of grief, friendship and self-pity, and asks how such displays of emotion were understood by contemporary onlookers. It is argued that a bishop's tears were key to perceptions of his masculinity, sexuality and physical body, which in turn had significant implications for his reputation both as a prelate and as a potential saint. Johann Huizinga's classic history of medieval Europe, The Autumn of the Middle Ages, begins with a chapter entitled 'The passionate intensity of life'. 'Modern man', he claimed 'has no idea of the unrestrained extravagance of the medieval heart'.1 This picture of the middle ages as an era of emotional incontinence has been substantially revised -perhaps even overturned -in recent decades, not least by the work of Barbara Rosenwein.2 Nevertheless, the novice reader of many medieval texts (perhaps especially of chronicles, saints' lives and canonization proceedings) could be forgiven for thinking that there is a good deal of truth in Huizinga's interpretation, for it is undeniable that they include far more accounts of powerful individuals engaging in public displays of emotion than the modern reader expects. One of the most common forms of emotional behaviour found in medieval texts is weeping, especially by religious men and women. This article explores the significance of the tears of one particular sub-section of this group: the bishops of late medieval England. Between the twelfth and early fourteenth centuries, England produced an unusually large number of saintly bishops.3 Several of them became officially canonized saints, and even more became the subject of detailed contemporary biographies. Without exception, each of these men is depicted weeping, usually with great frequency and incredible volume. Vauchez also provides a useful overview of the characteristics of the saint-bishop, at pp. 292-310.4 After the early 14th century there is a sharp decline in the number of references to episcopal weeping in English sources, which might be taken as further evidence for Piroska Nagy's theory that the importance of religious weeping was in decline by the 14th century (see P. Nagy, Le Don des larmes au moyen âge: un instrument spirituel en quête d'institution (Ve-XIIIe siécle) (Paris, 2000), pp. 363-412). On the other hand, this may well reflect changes in the nature of episcopacy, leading to the decline of both the saintly bishop and the episcopal vita.

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confidence: 99%

Episcopal emotions: tears in the life of the medieval bishop

Harvey

2014

Hist Res

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“…66 The document was discovered by Jacob Mann, in 1931 in Cairo's Geniza , a repository for documents deemed 'unusable'. 67 It dates possibly to the late thirteenth century, is composed in unsophisticated and badly spelt Hebrew, and details three Messianic episodes in the Jewish community of the Sicilian town of Catania.…”

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“…66 Elina Gertsman, referencing medieval and late Classical writers, also highlights the multivalent aspect of tears and weeping: they were sustenance, a sign of virtue, but also of deceit; of ignorance but also of divine insight; they could blur the vision, but also allow the one weeping to see clearly, as in the case of Mary Magdalene beholding Christ. 67 However, what unites these different properties was the perception that weeping was a predominantly female trait, borne of the female body's inherent weakness, inferiority and fleshliness. In this context, McNamer identifies affective devotion as 'insistently gendered' and observes the importance of compassio in such displays of piety, the act of feeling as or suffering alongside Christ or the Virgin Mary.…”

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confidence: 99%

“…Anderson maintains that the initial account of Auda's crisis of faith, which was attributed to an unconfessed sin, should have proved sufficient to close the case. 67 However, due to the increased prominence of priestly confession in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, Auda's initial confession was insufficient and unconvincing, which explains why Fournier summoned her so many times . 68 Anderson notes that in her third appearance, during which she dramatically changed her testimony, Auda discounted her unconfessed sin as the cause of her spiritual crisis.…”

Section: Previous Scholarshipmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…It includes tropes common to other sources both postand pre-dating Mirk. Christ's intimate and direct address to an individual, for example, features in the writings of Langland, Dante, Mechthild of Hackeborn, who predate Mirk, as well as in those of, Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich, writing at around the same time as him 67.…”

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Christa, Christus: Christ’s Transgressive, Gendered Flesh in Late Medieval European Literature

Kathryn¹

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This thesis examines responses to Christ’s gendered flesh that are located not in canonical literary texts or traditional saints’ lives, but in the sermons, visions and confessions of devout and orthodox men and women, whose orthodoxy, upon closer examination, is nevertheless decidedly unorthodox. In it, using a series of test cases, I argue that closer scrutiny of these non-canonical texts thus offers a more nuanced understanding of late-medieval notions of interplay between gender, sexuality and the divine than has been considered within previous scholarship. Beginning with the thirteenth-century Liber Specialis of Mechthild of Hackeborn (d. 1298), I demonstrate that, although remaining within the bounds of orthodox scripture and exegesis, the Saxon author nevertheless presents her readers with a Christ whose identity as saviour is predicated on his elevation of the female and the fleshly, and whose symbiotic, fluid relationship with Mechthild implicates her as co-redeemer through a divine, glorious, joyful, and uniquely feminine fecundity. I follow this with a detailed close analysis of the early fourteenth-century transcript of a young woman’s heresy trial in southern France, in which she confesses to equating Christ’s body with the ‘filth’ of the afterbirth, a concept so awful to her that she had been unable to believe in God or the transubstantiation. As I argue, however, Auda Fabri, experiences a species of revelation not unlike other orthodox female mystics, but, lacking their communities of discourse, must remain in a state of abjection from which capitulation to androcentric authority alone can save her. My third case-study is a sermon by the fourteenth-century English priest, John Mirk, in which Christ condemns an unconfessed merchant to Hell through the clotted blood from his feminised side-wound, which he casts at the dying man. I argue that, in attempting to uphold orthodox belief and practices, Mirk reveals a profound anxiety regarding late-medieval beliefs regarding the body and feminised flesh of Christ, whose appearance Mirk eventually demonises. Finally, to initiate my set of conclusions, I focus briefly on a largely unknown thirteenth-century Hebrew text, in which a Jewish woman in Sicily seems to give birth to a messianic figure from her body, which drips honey and oil. The woman’s ecstasy, resonant of the experiences of Christian women mystics like Mechthild, suggests some sort of commonality between the Sicilian Jewish and Christian female communities in pre-plague Europe. Ultimately, then, this thesis argues for – and contributes to – the need for far wider recognition of the importance of non-canonical and more generically varied source material and its closer scrutiny to gain better understanding of the deeply gendered complexities attached to the many labile beliefs concerning Christ’s flesh and blood during the Middle Ages.

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Reception of Images by Medieval Viewers

Caviness¹

2019

A Companion to Medieval Art

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Crying in the Middle Ages

Cited by 48 publications

References 0 publications

Episcopal emotions: tears in the life of the medieval bishop

Episcopal emotions: tears in the life of the medieval bishop

Christa, Christus: Christ’s Transgressive, Gendered Flesh in Late Medieval European Literature

Reception of Images by Medieval Viewers

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