Desire for the Past

Desire for the Past Nicholas Watson University ofWestern Ontario In the same way love grows between these two, so grows a fear there.And this fear is twofold.The first fear is that they fear they are not worthy of such a love and cannot do enough for it.This fear is noblest of all.Here one grows the most, andhere onesubmitstolove....This fearmakesaperson noble...it makesone's thought sparkle, teaches the heart, clarifies one's knowledge, makes the mind wise, unifies the memory, watches over one's words and works, and allows one to fear no death.All this does the fear that fears it cannot do enough for love. The second fear is, someone fears that love does not love them enough.For she binds them so painfully that they think love always oppresses them and helps them too little, and that they alone love....But this noble unfaith has such expanded knowledge! Even if anybody loves so violently that they fear to go mad, and their heart feels crushed, and their veins always stretch and rup­ ture, and their soul melts-even if anyone loves love so violently, nevertheless this noble unfaith can neither feel nor trust love, so expansive do unfaith and desire make each other....So high is unfaith, which always fears either that she does not love enough or that she is not enough loved. -Hadewijch Me thought I had sumdeele feelyng in the passion of Christ, but yet I desyred to have more by the grace of God.Me thought I woulde have ben that tyme with Magdaleyne and with other that were Christus lovers, that I might have seen bodilie the passion that our Lord suffered for me, that I might have suf­ fered with him, as other did that loved him.And therfore I desyred a bodely sight, wher in I might have more knowledge of the bodily paynes of our Savi­ our, and ofthe compassion of our lady and of all his true lovers that were lyvyng that tyme and saw his paynes; for I would have be one of them and have suffered with them. -Julian of Norwich In this papc,, I wm to think along a ,ig,ag Jin, about how and why we study the past, about the ways in which it is a good or bad thing 59 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER that we do, and especially about the role of feeling in our study. The zigzag line begins with a famous book, Caroline Walker Bynum's Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religiom Significance of Food to Medieval Winnen, a book whose paradoxes I return to again and again in the following pages. 1 The line then snakes back to puzzle over a critique ofthe book by Kathleen Biddick and, more briefly, another by David Aers, before pushing on with some thoughts ofmy own about the relations between the desire for the past Bynum's book evokes and the past's own expres­ sions ofdesire that are her subject.2 These thoughts are partly developed through a reading ofanother book, Karl Morrison's "I Am You": The Her­ meneutic:r of Empathy in \Vestern Literature, Theology, and Art, which lends the later parts ofmy discussion a justification for their methodology, or at lease their poetics. Morrison's explorations ofthe history ofempathy as a mode ofunderstanding, especially his analyses ofthe role of"herme­ neutic suspicion" as an integral part ofempathetic understanding, form an important general basis for the remarks about scholarly feeling I want to make.' But my particular sources are the writings ofmedieval women visionaries like the two quoted above, the thirteenth-century Dutch be­ guine Hadewijch and the fourteenth-century English anchoress Julian ofNorwich. By reading Bynum's account ofmedieval women'sspiritual­ ity alongside writers like these, the lacer parts of the paper formulate my own critique ofHoly Feast andHoly Fast, arguing that, far from repu­ diating Bynum's empathetic approach to the past, as Biddick would have us do, we need to go even further than Bynum in systematizing the role desire plays in historical scholarship. Indeed, I end by proposing that we adapt Hadewijch's and Julian's insights about...