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159 Chapter 5 An Estranged Wilderness “My sweet father,”begins a letter composed by Marguerite d’Oingt (d. 1310), fourth prioress of the Carthusian monastery of Poleteins, “you should know that I heard this preached by a superior of the Franciscans, in the middle of a sermon.”1 Questioned about a writing, now lost, in which she had described the passion of Christ in a manner that did not correspond to Scripture, Marguerite deferred first to the authority of a learned male Franciscan from whom she had learned to meditate on Christ’s passion and crucifixion with apparently striking imagery. We cannot know the specific terms through which she discussed the passion in this text. But we can make inferences based on Marguerite’s extant writings . The Pagina meditationum, for example, inspired by the Septuagesima liturgy of 1286, records the meditations triggered within Marguerite’s heart by thoughts of Christ’s crucifixion. The meditation portrayed Jesus Christ as a mother who gave birth to a new world through his suffering. In it, she praised Christ for having created the sun, the moon, stars, rain, hours, days, 1. Marguerite of Oingt,Les oeuvres de Marguerite d’Oingt, ed. and trans. Antonin Durafour,Pierre Gardette, and Paulette Durdilly (Paris: Belles Lettres, 1965), 140–42; trans. Renate BlumenfeldKosinski , in The Writings of Margaret of Oingt, Medieval Prioress and Mystic (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 1997), 64. 160 HOLY MATTER even heaven and earth. The description of the creation of the world in a meditation on the life of Christ would appear incongruous until Marguerite explained her attribution of creator to Christ: Oh, Sweet Lord Jesus Christ, who ever saw any mother suffer such a birth! But when the hour of the birth came you were placed on the hard bed of the cross where you could not move or turn around or stretch your limbs as someone who suffers such great pain should be able to do; and seeing this, they stretched you out and fixed you with nails and you were so stretched that there was no bone left that could still have been disjointed, and your nerves and all your veins were broken . And surely it was no wonder that your veins were broken when you gave birth to the whole world in one day.2 Marguerite’s Pagina was a meditation on the passion of Christ designed to glorify his death as the moment of the world’s re-creation. She imagined his blood as sprinkling the earth and renewing it, altering it into a new creation that offered material transcendence and salvation. Throughout her instructional writings Marguerite addressed Christ as her “father,” the “blessed Creator,” “good creator,” “sweet creator,” who “remade [the world] better and more beautiful,” and she revered Mary as the “mother of the Creator of all creatures.”3 Her passion meditation, with its detailed narrative evocation of the passion of Christ, might be characterized as Franciscan. Although the scholarly attribution of “Franciscan” to affective passion meditation is admittedly overwrought and complicated by the presence of women’s voices, nevertheless it applied here in an important way.4 Marguerite herself regularly appealed to Franciscan authorities for her style of meditation. She deliberately affiliated her meditation with Francis and with “Franciscan” passion narrative. In addition to the anonymous Franciscan scholar through whom she justified her meditational images,Francis of Assisi appeared as the only named nonbiblical person in her Pagina meditationum. There, she used his example to chastise nuns and other religious who grew lazy, talkative, 2. Marguerite, Pagina meditationum, in Durafour, Gardette, and Durdilly, Les oeuvres de Marguerite d’Oingt, 78; Blumenfeld-Kosinski, 31. 3. Marguerite, Pagina meditationum, p. 74: “O beate Creator.” In the Life of Beatrice of Ornacieux she praises the saint’s invocation of Mary as “mare del creatour de tota cretura” (in Durafour, Gardette, and Durdilly, Les oeuvres, 136). 4. Sarah McNamer, Affective Devotion and the Origins of Medieval Compassion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 88–95. AN ESTRANGED WILDERNESS 161 or malicious.5 Marguerite thus consciously grounded her writing in an established Franciscan tradition of vivid narrative passion meditation. Marguerite’s second treatise, entitled the Speculum, sought to instruct the women in her community on how to engage in meditative reading of a text. The Speculum, written in Marguerite’s native Franco-Provençal, received official approval in 1294, when Hugh, the prior of the Charterhouse of Valbonne, brought it to the Carthusian chapter general.6 Hugh’s interest in the treatise reflects...

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