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I. The Body as Text and the Semiotics of Suffering Clare of Montefalco's (d. 1308) persistent meditation on Christ's Passion in thought and in action was rewarded with a physical cross implanted in her heart. She was said to have felt the inskne of His Passion continually until her death. Her sisters so believed in the sign that when she died the11 tore open her body to find not only the Cross but the complete iiegnia of is Passion, from crown of thorns to the vinegar-soaked sponge offered to slake His thirst on Calvan.1 Although her Franciscan confessor denou~lced the ston as a fraud, it carries its own important insignia of late medieval hagiography and mysticism.2 Devotion to the Passion, particularly to Christ's suffering humanit); and bodily imitations of Christ's sufferi~lg such as Clare's characterize saints' vitae and mysticism from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries. Women saints and mystics in particular discovered a new source of power and sanctity through bodily manifestations of lives dedicated to Christ's Passion. The cult of saints had al~vays co~lsidered the body of the saint to be one of the "places of sanctification." Relics, like the eucharist itself, often dre\v their power ti-om the miraculous bodies of saints and bestowed those powers on geographical places, social communities, and indi1iduals.3 The idea of the colps~lorieux in hagiography is based on the transforn~atio~l of the saint's body ~vhich supposedly occurred at death, including irradiation, levitation, emission of miraculous odors and fluids, and the presen~ation of the body from decay or ~orruption.~ The difference bemeen this postmortem glorification of the saint's bodv and the paramystical phenomena of late medieval hagiography and mvsticism is that in the latter the bodily insgnia are incorporated into spiritual experience. The corporeal effects of meditation on Christ's Passion -such as the inscription of the Passiorl insknia in Claire's heart or the reception of stigmata-become the signs of mystical union and sanctification . Unlike the corpsglorieux, the living body is the site of the ma~elous, and as in Clare's vision, its manifestations are often interior, rather than 14 Chapter I external.5 The body's capacity for anazlng transformations marks and measures the soul's capacity for imitating Christ's Passion. Not all these corporeal imitations inspire suffering in the mystic or saint who experiences them. As much rapture as mortification attends these miraculous alterations of the bodv. In either case, the bodily component of mvstical experience manifests a physiological and often literal conformity to Christ's humanity. For many female and some male mystics, the corporeal aspect of mvstical meditation was neither metaphorical nor symbolic . For critics of;his spirituality, the sheer physicalitywas suspect and in need of refinement.6 Compared to many of the saints and mystics who followed her, Clare of Montefalco is not unusual. Ho~vever, her sanctification was one of the first to be based on paraphysical phenomena.' Her canonization can be seen as part of the larger movement of affective spirituality which thrived during the thirteenth through the fifteenth centuries. Scholars agree on the importance of the body and imitatioClmstito this movement. They further attribute this importance to the influence of Franciscan and Cistercian spirituality, as well as to the later Carthusian translation and circulation of mystical texts.8 The two identifiing features of affective spirituality-its corporeality and the imitation of Christ's suflkring humanity-are rarely disputed. What has been considered problematic is not the terms themselves but the antipathy of modern sensibilities to them. In her fascinating st-ady of the religious significance of food to medieval jvomen, Carolyn Walker Bynum has succeeded in drawing attention to this problem and in recovering the "essential strangeness of medieval religious experience."g Even feminist scholarship accepts these categories of affective spirituality as unproblematic in themselves. The difficuln~ some feminists have with affective spiritualih is \vomen's attraction to it. The distinction between body and soul in medieval medicine and theology was analogized to the difference benveen female and male, an analogy which carried with it the hierarchy of sexual difference.The feminization of the body of Christ in medieval devotional tests further problematizes the woman mystic's imitatw Christi because it seems merely to reinforce her subjection to repressivesocial , sexual,and theological hierarchies. After all, what is it which she embraces in her ilnitatio?The old "equation of victimisation, passivity...

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