ABSTRACT
The articles of The Mystical Gesture: Essays on Medieval and Early Modern Spiritual Culture are assembled in honor of Mary E. Giles, who has retired after a distinguished teaching career at California State University, Sacramento and in anticipation of her continued ground-breaking scholarship in the areas of sixteenth-century Spanish spiritual culture and the feminist aspects of mysticism. Giles is the Founding Editor of Studia Mystica, a journal devoted to the interdisciplinary connections among mysticism and the arts. The contributors to this volume are her friends, colleagues, and former students (both official and unofficial).The topics range chronologically from the late thirteenth to late seventeenth centuries and geographically from Germany, England, Italy, France, Spain, and New Spain (Mexico), though the volume's center of gravity is the spiritual culture of sixteenth-century Spain-as is fitting, given the profile of Giles's scholarly career. But the common concerns of each are the exploration of spiritual culture-how texts and writers shape expectations attending the life of the spirit and how they are in turn shaped by them. The important subthemes many of the essays share are the gendering of spiritual culture and the relationship between traditional literary genres like poetry and drama and spiritual discourse. Each text or spiritual figure covered here has a distinctive spiritual voice-a mystical gesture, if you will-that contributes an individual mysticism to the common spiritual culture they all share. Each scholar in her or his own way defines this mystical gesture.In "Mechthild von Magdeburg, the Devil and Antichrist,” Frank Tobin focuses on the thirteenth-century beguine visionary's imaginative treatment of evil in her Flowing Light o f the Godhead Mechthild depicts her confrontations with tempting devils in lively and vivid terms, taking particular delight in her verbal sparring with them. She emerges the victor in a contest of words in scenes that draw from folklore and, most importantly, medieval drama. In her two descants on the Antichrist tradition-which oddly break off without reaching any sense of conclusion-she adds her own imaginative details to the tradition of Antichrist and the end times. To the tradition delineated by such writers as Adso and Joachim of Fiore and such texts as the late-twelflh-century Play o f Antichrist, she appends details like the care the eschatological brothers
THE MYSTICAL GESTURE give to grooming their beards. For Tobin, Mechthild is essentially a creative writer rather than composer of theological treatises whose vision of the nature of evil is tempered by her imagination and sense of drama.William Langland's great fourteenth-century English poem, Piers Plowman, has been looked at primarily as a work of literature. Along with works like Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and the anonymous Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, it occupies the pinnacle of literary excellence in an age of great poems. Scholars and critics who contextualize it tend to speak of its social or theological nature. If Tobin invests a spiritual writer with attributes usually associated with poets and playwrights, M. Clemente Davlin in "The Spirituality of Piers Plowman," invests Langland with a spirituality usually associated with his close contemporaries Richard Rolle and Julian of Norwich. For Davlin the spirituality of Piers Plowman is biblical and liturgical, social and personal, God-centered yet oriented towards the laity. Davlin’s objective is to encourage reading Piers Plowman as a devotional work in the tradition of Rolle, Julian, and other mystics like Hildegard of Bingen and Meister Eckhardt.Robert Boenig likewise looks at a primarily "literary" text in light of its mysticism and spirituality. In "Doubled Truth: Skeptical Fideism, Pseudo-Dionysius, and the Second Shepherds' Play, he contextualizes the great Wakefield Master's Christmas play in terms of both the late thirteenth-century philosophical trend known as "skeptical fideism" and also the Dionysian mystical theology so influential in late medieval England. The skeptical fideists posited the existence of contradictory truths, particularly between observed nature and God's revelation, with the Church's dogma taking precedence through a motion of faith. Pseudo-Dionysius posited the simultaneous affirmation and denial of attributes of God as the basis of mystical knowledge of God, and writers like the author of The Cloud o f Unknowing and Julian of Norwich reflect and adapt his ideas. The Second Shepherds' Play, by presenting two contradictory manger scenes-one earthly and comic, the other heavenly and devout-participates in this doubling, which can likewise be traced on the level of the play's vocabulary and imagery.In her "Ecstasy, Prophecy, and Reform: Catherine of Siena as a Model for Holy Women of Sixteenth-Century Spain," Gillian T. W. Ahlgren bridges the gap between medieval and early modem spiritual culture by charting the influence the fourteenth-century Italian mystic Catherine of Siena had on several women in sixteenth-century Spain-Maria de Santo Domingo, Francisca de los Apostoles, and especially Teresa of Avila. Catherine was a Dominican tertiary who died at age 33 in 1380 after a life of penance and extreme asceticism. She wielded tremendous influence, particularly over Popes Gregory XI and Urban VI in their efforts to reestablish papal presence at Rome after decades of the pontiffs' residence at Avignon. Catherine conceived of her life as a humble martyrdom offered to God for the Church. Raymond of Capua's Life of
Catherine was one of the texts Cardinal Francicso Jimenez de Cisneros promoted in his efforts at a reforming spiritual renewal in early sixteenth-century Spain. Ahlgren describes how Marie de Santo Domingo, Francisca de los Apostoles, and Teresa of Avila consciously modeled their lives after that of Catherine, seeing in her ways of understanding their own conversions, sufferings, and roles in the Church's spiritual culture. As Ahlgren points out, Catherine's example was a formative one in the construction of a gendered spirituality in sixteenth-century Spain.Joseph F. Chorpenning likewise takes up the issue of influence in his "Bernadino de Laredo's Treatise on the Mysteries o f St. Joseph and the Evangelization of Mexico." Bernadino de Laredo was an early sixteenth-century Observant Franciscan friar whose treatise, also known as the Josephina, is an important text in the development of devotion to St. Joseph. Bernadino was an advocate of St. Joseph who strongly argued for the saint to be depicted as a young and vigorous protector of the Virgin and Jesus against the prevailing older assessment of him as an old man and the relative neglect shown to him in the Middle Ages. Bernadino cites the fifteenth-century French theologian Jean Gerson as well as scripture to support his thesis. Chorpenning notes the ubiquity of the Josephina in early Observant Franciscans' attempts in the early sixteenth century to convert the Amerindians in the regions recently conquered by the Spanish. He notes the social circumstances which contributed to early Mexican devotion to St. Joseph, especially the prevalence of mixed-race Spanish/Amerindian illegitimacy: in a demographic group where fathers were often absent, St. Joseph became a protecting father that the Amerindians could call their own in their emerging spiritual culture.The relationship between gender and genre is important for Elizabeth Rhodes in her "What's in a Name: On Teresa of Avila's Book." Rhodes points out that St. Teresa's first book, since Luis de Leon entitled it her Vida {Life) in the sixteenth century, has occasioned certain expectations about its genre that the book itself eludes. Teresa wrote it at age 47 at the behest of her confessor as a means of allaying fears that her experiences were not within the bounds of orthodoxy. She had yet to accomplish the major work of founding the Discalced Carmelites, so in no sense is this a completed "Life." The experiences she chooses to recount are more about her relationship with God than an orderly setting forth of the events of her life. The expectations that St. Augustine's Confessions engendered in her contemporary readership-and those that it still engenders in us today-are for a narrative of a dissolute early life interrupted by a radical conversion. Teresa rejects this model of autobiography, which male spiritual writers tend to follow, in favor of one Rhodes terms the "tradition of the virgin bride of Christ," one associated with medieval women like Catherine of Siena, Angela of Foligno, Clare of Assisi, and Birgitta of Sweden. In this woman's tradition a dissolute life and radical
conversion are replaced by a quiet struggle to find God’s will. Thus the male-model does not fit Teresa's text. Rhodes notes that Teresa's own term for it was her "Book"—a name that makes all the difference for a gendered reading of it. Jane Ackerman's "Teresa and her Sisters" is also a gendered reading of St. Teresa but from a biographical rather than generic point of view. Ackerman notes that most scholars who identify influences on Teresa concentrate on men, but as Mary Giles and Jodi Bilinkoff have maintained, individuals learn most from those who surround them-and in Teresa's case this was largely women. After an excursus about the role of the Virgin Mary in Carmelite spiritual culture, Ackerman gives brief biographical sketches of the women-most of the Carmelite nuns-who helped shape Teresa's spirituality and who were in turn shaped by her: Dona Guiomar de Ulloa, Antonia del Espiritu Santo, MariaBautista, Isabel de Santo Domingo, and Ana de San Bartolome. Ackerman traces the twin themes of humility and obedience in the relationships among Teresa and her sisters and suggests they bound these women together rather than separated them in a hierarchical structure.Alison Weber in her "Demonizing Ecstasy: Alonso de la Fuente and the Alumbrados of Extremadura" looks at the disturbing aspects of sixteenth-century Spanish spiritual culture by charting and then analyzing the career of a persecutor of heretics, Alonso de la Fuente. This Dominican Friar became alarmed at reports of how a secular priest, Gaspar Sanchez, was fostering contemplative prayer among a group of pious women in the town of Llerena, Extremadura, since such prayer, he thought, was the reserve of the spiritual elite, not ignorant women. He gradually convinced the authorities that there was demonic heresy and, more important, sexual license among these people, termed alumbrados. Confessions extracted by torture led to public floggings of the women and the defrocking of condemned priests. Soon Alonso began to see this eroto-demonic heresy everywhere, even among the Jesuit Order. His efforts to implicate the Jesuits, however, led to his discrediting. Weber sees in his career the mixing of the categories of the demonic with the erotic-a mixture that the Inquisition as a whole was not prepared to make. For Weber the story of the alumbrados of Extremadura is an important one for understanding the hermeneutics attending inquisitorial documents, for the incident, as she writes, is not "a story of sexual deviance, bu t . . . a story of how narratives of deviance are engendered."Michael Bradbum-Ruster's "The Beautiful Dove, The Body Divine: Luisa de Carvajal y Mendoza's Mystical Poetics" brings the volume back to the theme of the relationship between mysticism and creative writing while sustaining the attention to gender. Luisa de Carvajal y Mendoza was a late sixteenth-early seventeenth-century poet who, though never a nun, lived inside the orbit of the Spanish Jesuits, residing for a time with them in Elizabethan
England, whose religious allegiance was hotly contested by Catholics and Protestants. Bradburn-Ruster notes her reliance in her poetry on Jesuit meditative techniques, particularly the appeal to each of the senses. Through an analysis of her image of her soul as a beautiful dove finding shelter in Christ’s wounded side, Bradburn-Ruster defines in her poetry a body-oriented poetic, one which he shows has affinities with mystical themes in Hindu, Buddhist, and Jewish/Kabbalistic mysticism.Like Bradburn-Ruster, Evelyn Toft explores the work of an early modern woman poet. Her "Cecilia de Nacimiento: Mystic in the Tradition of John of the Cross" introduces that early seventeenth-century mystical poet and argues that her work is worth more than the relative neglect it has hitherto had among scholars and critics. Cecilia de Nacimient, a second-generation Discalced Carmelite nun, was a skillful poet whose work, as Toft claims, "Demonstrates an intellectual clarity and fullness of heart reminiscent of Juan de la Cruz [John of the Cross]." Through close readings of Cecilia de Nacimiento's poetry and her own prose commentaries upon it (a dual-genre approach she shares with John of the Cross) Toft demonstrates how well-aligned her poetics and her mystical theology are with John’s. Cecilia de Nacimiento's work demonstrates that the spiritual culture of the early Discalced Carmelites was still operative among their younger followers.Wendy M. Wright picks up a theme treated in Michael Bradbum-Ruster's essay: entering into Christ’s body through the wounded side. In her "Inside My Body is the Body of God: Margaret Mary Alacoque and the Tradition of Embodied Mysticism," Wright recounts a vision Alacoque had in 1673 in which through the medium of erotic-mystical imagery the visionary exchanges hearts with Christ. Alacoque was at the time a young nun of the Visitation convent in Paray-le-Monial, France, the Visitaitonists being an order of religious founded at the beginning of the seventeenth century by Francis de Sales and Jane de Chantal. Wright contextualizes Alacoque's vision in the tradition of what she terms "embodied mysticism," whose roots go back to the Middle Ages. This type of spirituality involves profound emphasis on the body-Christ's wounded and suffering body and the bodily manifestations it has on the mystics who follow this way. St. Francis’s stigmata comprise, of course, one famous example of embodied mysticism. Wright establishes the specific exchange of hearts with Jesus as an important component of this mysticism and mentions analogues among the medieval women mystics Gertrude the Great, Mechthild of Hakeborn (both members of the same community as Mechthild of Magdeburg), Dorothy of Montau, Lutgard of Trond, Catherine of Siena, and others. Wright uses Alacoque's experience as an occasion for claiming that embodied mysticism "takes seriously the divine disclosure of the cross, a disclosure which is an invitation into unknowing, paradox, abandonment, and, ultimately, absence."
