Theories of the Passions and the Ecstasies of Late Medieval Religious Women

It is well known to those of us who share a passion for the lives and reconstruction of the lives and actions and thoughts--the gestures, behaviors and emotions--of medieval men and women that the people we study did not necessarily understand themselves the way we understand ourselves. This is especially true with regard to the interpretations given to emotions and passions. Even the way I began the last sentence, with the assertion that we share "a passion" evokes a modern psychological conception of how human beings work. It can, however, be instructive to remember that medieval Christians categorized much of what we think of as "passions"--anger, jealousy, lust--among the Seven Deadly Sins. ¹ Our common assumption about human passions, like almost all post-Freudian ideas about human nature, is essentially interior, consisting of concepts that begin within the human psyche--or heart--or soul. In contrast, people in the pre-modern world, from classical antiquity and continuing through "the long Middle Ages" into the middle of the seventeenth century, understood human nature in a different way--if not exactly as a result of, then at least intrinsically allied to, external forces. This "humoral theory" of human nature explains human existence as linked to an enormous, cosmic, series of interrelated phenomena: the stars, the cardinal directions, the essential elements of all creation and the essential humors of the human body.

A review of theories of microcosm and macrocosm from the first century to the dawn of the modern era is not possible here, although I would like to make some observations on this philosophical and theological tradition. Suffice it to say that many influential cosmological theories influenced the Latin West; they mostly originated in the Greek world, with Plato as a starting-point, and were directly influential at least through the sixth century, and in a secondary way from the ninth century onward. ² The basic concept is a parallelism between small and finite humans, and larger and more lasting entities, such as the relationship between humans and the world-soul in Plato's Timaeus, and Augustine's understanding of the human soul as a small reflection of the Trinity. ³ By the time of the twelfth-century author Bernardus Silvestris, as Winthrop Weatherbee put it, "[t]he ideal of a harmony between macrocosm and microcosm was becoming a cliché." ⁴ The Cosmographia of Bernardus Silvestris thus tries to say something more sophisticated about this issue. Barnardus's Cosmographia, is divided into two books entitled "Macrocosmos" and "Microcosmos;" like the contemporary De planctu naturae of Alan of Lille, it leads to the creation of human beings. In Bernardus, this is done by Physis, in Alan by Natura, and exactly in the image of the macrocosm. ⁵

Books IV and XI of Isidore of Seville's Etymologiae are a major source for the transmission of Greek medical thought into the Christian Middle Ages, especially with respect to the correspondence between macrocosmic elements and the human microcosm that is characteristic of Hippocratic medicine. ⁶ Such a "humoral" understanding of human nature links our emotions and passions with far greater forces. Perhaps this link gives a particular importance to what we moderns understand as human emotion, and helps to explain the stubborn persistence of some aspects of the galenic cosmology into the modern world. One example of this is the role the humors played in Baroque art, as Zirka Filipczak explains in her lavishly illustrated book on the far-reaching aesthetic consequences of a general knowledge and acceptance of these theories into the seventeenth century. ⁷

Although the title of my paper refers specifically to the later Middle Ages, I would actually like to focus my remarks on examples from a slightly later part of "the long Middle Ages," the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, to investigate how theories of the Passions changed as they survived.

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