Queeste. Tijdschrift over middeleeuwse letterkunde in de Nederlanden. Jaargang 2004

[p. 221]

Seeking to Find the Speech of Silent Women
Hermina Joldersma

Naar aanleiding van:Thérèse de Hemptinne en María Eugenia Góngora (red.), The Voice of Silence. Women's Literacy in a Men's Church. Turnhout, Brepols, 2004. Medieval Church Studies 9. ISBN 2-503-51488-X. Prijs: ....

‘Seek and ye shall find’, the pithy expression with which Jesus captured the often accurate relationship between ‘seeking’ and ‘finding’, is always at the back of my mind when I take to hand yet another well-researched study about medieval women. That there were women in the middle ages, we are sure; but how can we come to know more than just that one bald fact? ‘Knowing more’ takes time, patience, effort, imagination; even more- importantly, it takes seeking, the willingness to engage specifically in the search for women's voices, however soft or minor they might be, within the dominating din of men's discourse. This collection of essays demonstrates the truth of that dictum: seeking does result in finding, and through this book the ‘voice of women's silence’ has become a little louder than it was before.

It is useful for our appreciation of the book to understand the context of its genesis in an unusual international and interdisciplinary collaborative project, a half decade of interaction between scholars from the Universidad de Chile in Santiago and the Universities of Gent and Antwerp (ufsia) in Belgium, focussing on ‘women as actors in late medieval society and culture and on the representation of these topics’ (vii). The essays in the book arise from a final conference that included scholars beyond the core group, altogether representing disciplines as varied as history, literature, theology, philosophy, medieval studies, and art history. This context explains the co-existence of detailed interpretive essays on what we might consider, relatively speaking, some ‘loud’ women's voices from the Middle Ages, especially Hildegard von Bingen (four essays directly and one tangentially) and Hadewijch (one essay), with more factually-oriented studies compiling ‘hard’ evidence of women's literacy (three essays) and consideration of women's voices as filtered through male representation (four essays). The perspectives employed vary as widely as the disciplines and the geographical homes of the scholars, and the result is a very broad range of fascinating contributions. I will single out a few for more detailed discussion.

Leading off the four interpretive studies on Hildegard von Bingen is an essay in which Jeroen Deploige thinks about this most famous of medieval religious women through the lens of categories developed by sociologist philosophers Max Weber and Pierre Bourdieu. Specifically, Deploige considers Hildegard's place in the ‘“religious field” in which priests, prophets, and magicians act as competing religious agents in search of legitimacy and of lay followers’ (p. 7). With appropriate qualifications he plausibly locates Hildegard's ‘potential subversiveness’ within the framework of this model, suggesting that initially that subversiveness lay in her sex and marginality, not in her otherwise socially conservative position. Even as early as the 13^th century she seems to have become ‘a kind of christianized oracle’ (p. 18) - and that her writings served as a source of inspiration is demonstrated also in this volume by Jeffrey Hamburger's essay.

Still, the next four essays do not particularly pick up these considerations - the authors are not interested in the first instance in ‘place in religious field’ as it can be determined by tracing influence, but rather they use close reading of specific details to characterize what might be said about the voices of both Hildegard and Hadewijch within the dominant (male) discourse. In other words, the essays do not posit as their main point that these mystics speak as women, but that they speak at all; within that premise, specific points are put under the microscope and held up against their use by other writers, both male and female, to determine what might be unique and/or personal about them. As the focus of the Chilean group was Hildegard, three authors from that group study her work: María Eugenia Góngora contrasts virga and feminae forma as two images of incarnation which differently emphasize the place of woman in the genealogy of Christ, María Isabel Flisfisch looks at Hildegard's relatively positive resolution of the Eve-Mary dichotomy in her Symphonia, and Beatriz Meli situates the

[p. 222]

themes of virginitas and auctoritas in Hildegard's Symphonia in the context of her need for validating the controversial establishment of her Rupertsberg nunnery. Veerle Fraeters rounds out this section by analysing the vision as genre to establish that Hadewijch's visions, and not only her poems and letters, demonstrate her high degree of literacy and her skill as a writer. All four essays are methodologically interesting for the way evidence of a woman's voice is sought in textual nuance and detail.

Much different is the careful combing of archival material that provides the evidence in the complementary essays by Walter Simon and Thérèse de Hemptinne, which look for answers to the broad question of women's literacy by teasing out facts that connect women with books. Both ask deceptively simple questions: ‘Did medieval beguines read and write, and if so, why?’ (Simon), what evidence is there ‘for the observation that at the end of the Middle Ages some women in the Low Countries elaborated a special relationship with written culture and books’? (de Hemptinne). The situation for beguines is complicated by what Simon calls the ‘informal structure of beguine life’ (p. 110), an informality which precluded the establishment of the kind of institutions that would foster book production (scriptoria) or book preservation (libraries). This is reflected in the small fraction of the traceable manuscripts surviving to our time that can be connected with beguines: working with the attributions compiled by Stooker and Verbeij,¹ for example, Simon arrives at slightly less than 7% of the collections they list as attributable to beguines. The number for regular canonesses and female tertiaries is much higher, 29% and 21% respectively - what this does tell us, amazingly, is that well over half of the manuscripts listed by Stooker and Verbeij can be connected with women's institutions. Both Simon and De Hemptinne look at inscriptions in books, at wills, and at bequests from within and without the walls of religious institutions, to determine further connections between women and books. The evidence they compile from these sources provides incontrovertible proof that women owned books, and valued them highly.

These facts do not, of course, speak to authorship, and they also demonstrate that almost all of this ownership concerned religious writings. De Hemptinne concludes succinctly: ‘Devotional practices, prayer, and meditation were their main reasons for writing, possessing, and reading books’ (p. 111). This is true even for the lay urban society that is included in De Hemptinne's research: while the bequeathments vary (books, or the money to buy books, to daughters, god-children, intimate friends), the books in question are almost always Books of Hours and Psalters. There are rare bequests in women's wills of different kinds of literature, such as history and romances - but the recipient of these bequests are almost exclusively men. This confirms for the Middle Ages what has been observed as a general principle for later times: in the Low Countries, women's literature is primarily religious for a long time, longer than in some other countries, especially France.² De Hemptinne has elsewhere established that women were quite involved in the book production that was such an important industry in the Low Countries in the later Middle Ages (literature in footnote 1 of her essay, p. 112), which does speak to literacy if not, of course, to authorship.

But even in those instances in which it can be established that the origins of a religious text are to be located with a woman, this text most often passed through many (male) filters before this ‘woman's voice’ crystallized into the form which has come down to us. Teasing out these filters, and assessing how they themselves might be filtered out, is the goal of Wybren Scheepsma's essay on the document he titles the Revelacien, a relatively unknown vision cycle from the circles of the fifteenth-century Modern Devotion. The source contains three letters with five (or six) visions, rounded out by a prologue and an

1 K. Stooker and T. Verbeij: Collecties op orde. Middelnederlandse handschriften uit kloosters en semi-religieuze gemeenschappen in de Nederlanden. Leuven, Peeters,1997. 2 vols. (Miscellanea Neerlandica 15-16).

2 For the exclusivity of religious writing see Orlanda S.H. Lie, ‘Middelnederlandse literatuur vanuit genderperspectief. Een verkenning’, in: Tijdschrift voor Nederlandse Taal- en Letterkunde 117 (2001), p. 246-267; for its continuing dominance well past the Middle Ages see the extensive introduction in M.A. Schenkeveld-van der Dussen et al. (eds.): Met en zonder lauwerkrans. Schrijvende vrouwen uit de vroegmoderne tijd 1550-1850: van Anna Bijns tot Elise van Calcar. Amsterdam, University of Amsterdam Press, 1997.

[p. 223]

epilogue which are scrupulous in their attribution of various roles played in the genesis of the document. As a result, we know that the visions were received by a female religious, that the person who recorded them in the form come down to us relied on ‘third-hand’ letters for his source, and that he was likely a male cleric acting on the orders of his male superior (who must have been the primary recipient of the letters in question). Scheepsma concludes that there were likely at least three male filters for the original ‘woman's voice’: the confessor who first heard the visions and wrote the three letters containing them to his monastic superior; this superior who authorized the incorporation of the visions into one document; the author who composed that document on the orders of his superior.

Are there ways to determine the effect of these filters on the original ‘woman's voice’? We can never be sure about the hand of either the confessor or the superior, unfortunately, but the anonymous male author provides us with somewhat more to go on. He is manifestly present in the prologue and epilogue, which are his own, and as a result we can get some sense of his contribution. For one, he voices unease with visionary literature generally, an unease which he counters by anchoring himself in Scripture and the Church Fathers, and more importantly, by distancing himself from the content of the material he has been required to record. There is no evidence (at least Scheepsma does not cite such) that his unease is rooted in the origins of that visionary material in a woman. The author's unease has a felicitous effect for us: he maintains a scrupulous distance towards the content of his material, recording it as presented and taking no credit for it. From this we might be justified in concluding that at least this author transmitted faithfully the ‘woman's voice’ as it was presented to him.

I would have liked Geert Warnar's essay better if he had not adopted quite such an exhortational tone in his (re)consideration of just how much - if at all - Jan van Ruusbroec was influenced by the female mystical writings of his time. Warnar's exhortations concern the excesses of ‘a late-twentieth-century feminist agenda for medieval studies’, ‘feminist medievalism’, and ‘feminist preferences’ (all p. 196). These lead him to preface his otherwise interesting main point - Ruusbroec's writings exhibit a demonstrable preference for the intellectual products of his male scholarly world, including that male world's view of women - with a three-page quarrel with feminist scholarship, particularly as embodied by Barbara Newman. They also lead him to structure his essay less than optimally, for his main point comes at the end of his essay, after conclusions reached on the basis of that main point: modern, particularly feminist, scholars have underestimated the degree to which men and women lived in separate worlds, even the writings of an important mystic such as Hadewijch did not have a broad impact beyond an immediate circle, Ruusbroec's writings do not contain evidence of influence by women. But in situating these points as he does, Warnar makes it harder for even a potentially sympathetic reader to accept what might be true about these observations. For example, the statement that ‘Newman's premises' - “From the earliest years of Christianity, the Church has had a problem with women” - have to be accounted for by historical research’ (p. 196), implies that no such historical research has been done (by Newman or others), and that any attribution of misogyny to the Church is one of those ‘clichés about authority, power, and status’ that results from dubious ‘feminist preferences’. But surely Warnar cannot mean this: even the essays with which his keeps company in the book are chock full of ‘historical research’ demonstrating that the church more often and more quickly perceived women's actions as problematic (see e.g. Meli p. 49, Katrien Heene, pp. 147-148, Scheepsma p. 211).Warnar also argues that Meister Eckhart and his fellow mendicants constructed their highly intellectual sermons as discussions among themselves, ‘simply because there is hardly any evidence that they preached to women on a regular basis’ (p. 205). If this is true, for Eckhart and for highly intellectual sermons generally, it is an important guide to differences that we might expect between men's and women's literacy. But it does not therefore follow that men and women lived in separate worlds and did not influence each other at all. Again, even within the present collection of essays, proof of the interaction

[p. 224]

between cloistered women and the religious men responsible for them is amply documented. For example, in the immediately preceding essay, Jeffrey Hamburger proves that despite the absence of ‘hard’ evidence with respect to manuscript ownership (e.g. not one of the 35 extant copies of Johannes Tauler's 1339 sermon on ‘The Various Writings of Humanity’ can be traced to the nunnery where he first preached it, p. 171), internal textual evidence leaves no doubt that Tauler's sermon was based on an image in a woman's writing (Hildegard von Bingen's Scivias) reproduced in a women's institution (the refectory of St Gertrude in Cologne), and preached to the women there.

In part, the quarrel Warnar picks with Newman exemplifies one of the fundamental differences between Dutch and Anglo-American scholarship, and one which has fascinated me increasingly over the last decade: whether primacy is to be accorded to provable fact or to imaginative interpretation. Straddling both scholarly traditions as I must, I can see advantages and disadvantages in both. Over the years I have learned that the always implicit and often explicit question in Dutch scholarship is: ‘kun je dat hard maken?’ That question has the important and positive function of encouraging scholars to seek ‘facts’ more thoroughly and diligently, and in that sense I have learned a great deal from it. But I have also - quite often - experienced its use as a cudgel to nip in the bud the imaginative interpretation of those facts, and especially of potentially fruitful speculation not in the first instance based on fact. When used as a cudgel, ‘hard maken’ (incidentally, an interesting phrase from a Freudian perspective) can be translated in essence as: ‘if you can't prove it, don't think it’. This I consider unfortunate, for it seems to me that speculative interpretation is a form of ‘seeking’, via the mind - and I consider the insights that are ‘found’ by this route to be a strength of the Anglo-American scholarly tradition. At the same time, I can understand that from the Dutch perspective this speculative bent can sometimes be caricatured as: ‘if you can think it, you don't have to prove it’. The best scholarship, in my view (and without claiming that I have achieved it), results from a marriage between these two extremes.

In that regard, my favourite scholar on late-medieval religious women has been for some time art historian Jeffrey Hamburger, represented in this collection by ‘The “Various Writings of Humanity”: Johannes Tauler on Hildegard von Bingen's Scivias’. Hamburger's essay is actually not in the first instance about women, or women's voices, but about the role of art in spirituality, specifically the complex interaction between image and text in what he calls ‘the iconographic imagination’ of the Middle Ages (p. 168). But Hamburger's quest to understand this iconographic imagination leads him consistently to women,³ in the article included here to a glimpse of a moment of interaction between a prominent male mystic and the nuns in his care. Hamburger reads Tauler's sermon from multiple perspectives, for example by tracing how his explication of the image differs from Hildegard's. One of these perspectives, and the one that qualifies the essay for inclusion in this collection, is seeking to understand what the reactions of the nuns might have been to Tauler's sermon. Hamburger does this, for example, by contrasting points that Tauler makes with what would have been the norm in didactic literature of the time: ‘In the context of other didactic texts with which the nuns of St Gertrude were surely familiar, Tauler's call to descend, rather than ascend, must have come as something of a shock’ (p. 187-188). Hamburger imagines and speculates plausibly, but does not insist on more than his material will prove - that both the image and Tauler's explication of it provide us with a glimpse of nuns who were sophisticated and theologically literate religious women. They themselves do not speak, but by teasing out a picture of them as audience Hamburger establishes their presence and their potential voices.

Taken altogether, the essays demonstrate primarily two things: firstly, that seeking is a prerequisite to finding, and that women's voices can be found if sought; secondly, that these women's voices are not spectacularly loud clarion calls that have been wilfully overlooked. Almost certainly we will never find a previously undiscovered major female author in the medieval Low Countries. But in a sense that does not matter; what matters is that we come to know what is to be known, whatever that may be, through whatever careful attendance to minute details might be necessary. In terms of both content and methodology all of these essays contribute important pieces to that undertaking.

Adres van de auteur: 928-34^th St. NW, Calgary AB, Canada, T2N 2Y1

3 Besides numerous articles see two of his major books: J.F. Hamburger, The Rothschild Canticles. Art and Mysticism in Flanders and the Rhineland circa 1300, New Haven CT, Yale University Press, 1990; J.F. Hamburger, Nuns as Artists. The Visual Culture of a Medieval Convent, Berkeley CA, University of California Press, 1997.