Teaching Dante as a Visionary Prophet

As a scholar of medieval Christianity, I spend much of my time analyzing visionary literature. In my research on Elisabeth of Schönau, Hildegard of Bingen, and Gertrude of Helfta, I pursue questions about claims to extraordinary religious experience and the attempts of women to articulate the meaning they created from what they believed they saw, heard, and felt from God. In my teaching, I introduce the visionary works of these and other medieval women to students, inviting them to engage with these texts as artifacts of religious aspiration, of human collaborations in textual production, and of diverse adaptations to gender expectations. I came to the study of Dante in order to explore how his poetic vision would affect my understanding of the scope of medieval visionary literature, and thereby I also bring Dante into my teaching of medieval Christianity. Just as I have worked to move my students from seeing women's visionary discourse as mere "literary device," I have wanted to problematize an understanding of the Commedia as "merely" a literary or allegorical text and to enable students to engage with it as an authentically religious vision in the broadest sense of "vision." In the context of an advanced-level religion seminar on the role of visuality in medieval Christianity, I introduced Dante to students who had already read some works by medieval women visionaries and mystics, and our ensuing discussion of Dante circled around the comparison between him and Hildegard of Bingen, in particular.

From Hildegard's lifetime in the mid-twelfth century through the end of the Middle Ages, there is evidence of countless women who engaged in contemplative practices and perceived themselves drawn into the presence of God. Some of these women — by themselves or with collaborators — produced texts attempting to describe their experience, and others were known only by hagiographical vitae produced about them by their confessors or followers. Although there is no inherent female essence in these texts, they can usefully be studied as a body of literature within the larger tradition of western Christian mysticism (Clark forthcoming), and unlike works associated with male mystics, such as Augustine, Bernard of Clairvaux, or Bonaventure, they have not been seriously examined in relation to Dante. Many texts associated with these medieval women mystics abound in the language of love and desire, ecstasy, suffering and loss, and the paradox of using words to describe what they claim to be transcendent and ineffable. Some offer narratives of movement toward God, of succor offered by saintly beings, of repentance and purification, of glimpses of the otherworld. All of these themes resonate with aspects of Dante's Commedia.

For students, the exploration of comparison raises the question of influence: Did Dante know Hildegard's works or those of other medieval women mystics? There is no known evidence that Dante knew Hildegard, and her works had very limited circulation in Italy. Perhaps he knew the works of Mechthild of Hackeborn, a thirteenth-century German nun, and she has occasionally been suggested as the identity of the mysterious Matelda in the earthly paradise.¹ Angela of Foligno, cited by Ubertino da Casale as an influence on his own mystical life in his Arbor Vitae Crucifixae Iesu, "a work undoubtedly known to Dante,"² is not referred to by Dante. Strikingly, for all of Dante's parade of characters, only one woman author — mystical or otherwise — is alluded to in the Commedia, Clare of Assisi, creator of the monastic rule followed by a nun encountered in Paradise (Paradiso III, 97-103).³ No contemporary or recent holy woman is described. The religious landscape of Dante's Italy was full of holy women known for their mystical experience: Angela of Foligno, Umiliana of Cerchi, Gherardesca of Pisa, Margaret of Cortona, Cecilia of Florence, Clare of Montefalco, Margaret of Città di Castello. Perhaps Dante shared the sentiments of Franco Sacchetti, a Florentine writing only thirty years after Dante's death, that these women were somehow threatening — too familiar, too new, too unsophisticated (qtd. in Frugoni 1999: 152). Dante's silence about this remarkable aspect of his own religious world perhaps hints...